M - Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety Flashcards
Anxiety
An unpleasant emotional state that is often accompanied by increased HR and rapid breathing, i.e. physiological arousal.
What effect does anxiety have on accuracy/memory?
Negative and/or positive.
Explain the effect of stress/anxiety on not only memory but also performance generally
Negative effect on memory as well as performance generally (performance on complicated cognitive tasks is reduced by stress).
What study did Johnson and Scott (1976) carry out?
Study on the weapon focus effect.
Who carried out a study on the weapon focus effect?
Johnson and Scott (1976).
What is the weapon focus effect?
The view that a weapon in a criminal’s hand distracts attention (because if the anxiety is creates) from other features and therefore reduces the accuracy of identification.
Describe the procedure of the study done by Johnson and Scott (1976) on the effects of anxiety (the weapon focus effect)
They asked ppts to sit in a waiting room where they heard an argument in an adjoining room and then saw a man run through the room carrying either a pen covered in grease (low anxiety condition) or a knife covered in blood (high anxiety, ‘weapon focus’ condition).
Ppts were later asked to identify the man from a set of photographs.
Describe the findings of the study done by Johnson and Scott (1976) on the effects of anxiety (the weapon focus effect)
The findings supported the idea of the weapon focus effect. Mean accuracy was 49% in identifying the man in the pen condition, compared with 33% accuracy in the knife condition.
Loftus et al. (1987) showed that anxiety does focus attention on central feature of a crime (e.g. the weapon). The researchers monitores eyewitnesses’ eye movements and found that the presence of a weapon caused attention to be physically drawn towards the weapon itself and away from other things such as the person’s face.
Explain the evidence for the alternative view that anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy
High arousal/anxiety creates more enduring and accurate memories.
For example, there is an evolutionary argument that suggests it would be adaptive to remember events that are emotionally important so that you could identify similar situations in the future and recall how to respond - such as what you did last time when you escaped from a lion.
Christianson and Hubinette (1993) found evidence of enhanced recall when they questioned 58 real witnesses to bank robberies in Sweden. The witnesses were either victims (bank teller) or bystanders (employee or customer), i.e. high and low anxiety respectively. The interviews were conducted 4-15 months after the robberies.
The researchers found that all witnesses showed generally good memories for details of the robbery itself (better than 75% accurate recall). Those witnesses who were most anxious (the victims) had the best recall of all. This study generally shows that anxiety does not reduce accuracy of recall.
Christianson (1992), in a review of research, concluded that memory for negative emotional events is better than for neutral events, at least for the central details.
What is the Yerkes-Dodson effect?
The observation that arousal has a negative effect on performance (such as memory recall), when it is very low or very high, but moderate levels are actually beneficial.
The inverted-U theory.
What evidence is there for resolving the contradiction that anxiety either causes an increase, or a decrease in performance?
Kenneth Deffenbacher (1983) reviewed 21 studies of the effects of anxiety on eyewitness memory and found that 10 of these studies had results that linked higher arousal levels to increased eyewitness accuracy while 11 of them showed the opposite.
Deffenbacher also suggested that the Yerkes-Dodson effect can account for this apparent inconsistency. According to this principle, there would be occasions when anxiety/arousal in only moderate and then eyewitness accuracy would be enhanced. When anxiety/arousal is too extreme then accuracy will be reduced.
What is the catastrophe theory that Fazey and Hardy (1988) suggested to show the relationship between anxiety and performance?
It is similar to the inverted-U theory (Yerkes-Dodson effect) where as arousal increases, performance rises to an optimal point and then decreases. However, as cognitive anxiety increases, performance falls off a cliff after the optimal point and even arousal drops slightly. This is catastrophe theory.
