Memory – eyewitness testimony – anxiety Flashcards
What is anxiety?
An unpleasant emotional state where we fear that something bad is about to happen people become anxious when they’re in stressful situations.
What is the negative effect of anxiety argument?
One argument is that anxiety create physiological arousal in the body which prevents us paying attention to important cues so recall is worse.
What is the weapons focus effect?
Johnson and Scott studied the weapons focus effect where participants were led to believe they were waiting to take part in a study while seated in a waiting room participant had an argument in the next room in the low anxiety condition. A man walked through the waiting area a pen with grease on his hands in the high anxiety condition. The argument was accompanied by the sound of breaking glass and a man walking out of the room holding a knife that was covered in blood.
What were the findings of Johnson and Scott study into anxiety having a negative effect on the eyewitness testimony?
Participants later had to pick out the man from a set of 50 photos:
49% of the low anxiety condition correctly identified him.
33% of the high anxiety condition correctly identified him.
What was the conclusion of Johnson and Scott’s weapons Focus effect?
The tunnel theory of memory argues that a witness‘s attention narrows to focus on a weapon because it is a source of anxiety.
What is the positive argument of anxiety?
Another argument is that anxiety create a physiological arousal in the body which triggers the fight or fight response and increases alertness this therefore improves the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.
What was Yuille and Cutsall study into anxiety having a positive effect on eyewitness testimony?
- A real life shooting in a gun shop in Canada where the shop owner shot a thief dead 21 witnesses in total and 13 took part in the study.
- interview took place 4 to 5 months after the original incident and will compared with the original police interviews made at the time of the shootings.
– Accuracy was determined by the number of correct details details reported in each interview. The participants were also asked to write how stress they felt at the time on a seven point scale to assess their anxiety levels at the time.
What was the findings of Yuille and Cutshall study into the positive effect of anxiety on the eyewitness testimony?
Participants were very accurate in their account and there was a little change in the eyewitness testimony even after five months. Participants who reported highest levels of stress were the most accurate in their recall. This was 88% of accuracy compared to 75% for the less stressed group.
What was the conclusion of Yuille and Cutshall study into the positive effect of anxiety on the eyewitness testimony?
Suggest that anxiety does not have a detrimental effect on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony in a real world context and may even enhance it.
What was Yerkes and Dodson’s, inverted U theory?
Anxiety can have both a positive and negative effect on someone’s ability to accurately recall.
What was Yerkes and Dodson’s law based on?
Rats in mazes: there was one right way through the maze and wrong route gave electric shocks. They were looking for the optimum punishment where the rats learned quickest.
As voltage increase the learning increased also beyond the certain voltage performance went down as rats started to slow down freeze and retreat .
They showed increasing stress only motivate until the point of stress rather than the task becomes the increasing focus of attention.
What did Defenbacher do?
-Reviewed 21 studies of eyewitness testimony and noted contradictory findings on the effect of anxiety but which fit with the Yerke-Dodson principal:
-When we witness a crime, we become an emotionally and physiologically aroused.
– This manifest as both anxiety and fight or flight response.
– Recall is optimal when the level of anxiety is optimal.
– Outside of lower or higher recall is reduced.
What is a limitation of the Johnson and Scott study?
Questionable construct validity research as may have been measuring the effect of surprise on eyewitness testimony rather than the intended anxiety - Pickel conducted an experiment to test whether the weapons are focus affect as a result of anxiety or surprise he created contrasting conditions in a hairdressing salon. He had the confederate scissors a handgun a wallet and a wall witness testimony accuracy was significantly poor in the unusual conditions - research could suggest that the weapons affect is due to surprise - Johnson and Scott findings therefore may not tell us anything about the effect of anxiety on eyewitness testimony.
What is an imitation of the research into anxiety on eyewitness testimony?
It ignores the individual differences of emotional sensitivity - Bothwell tested participants for neuroticism and labelled as emotionally stable or neurotic. for the stable participants as anxiety increase so did the levels of eyewitness testimony, accuracy and the opposite for neurotic participants - Deffenbacher suggest that the modest effect sizes seen in studies of anxiety may be due to the averaging out of sensitive and non-sensitive participants and there cannot be one universal explanation - presents a limitation of taking a non-thetic approach of studying the effects of anxiety on eyewitness testimony.
What is the strength of the approach?
Supportive evidence which replicates the yerkes and Dodson principle - Valentine and Mesout had subject describe a person they encountered as they walked through the labyrinth of horror in London. They were splitting into high and low anxiety based on heart rate and post questionnaires high anxiety subjects recalled the fewest details -anxiety clearly disrupted the participants recall and was based on both objective and subjective measures - suggesting that a high level of anxiety does have a negative affect on the immediate eyewitness recall of a stressful event and the data fit with the yerkes Dudson principal.
