the effect of anxiety on eye witness testimony Flashcards
what is anxiety?
a state of emotional and physical arousal often including worried feeling of thoughts
What is the explanation of the negative effect of anxiety on recall?
anxiety prevents us from paying attention to important cues
What is the explanation of the positive effect of anxiety in recall
anxiety increases a persons alertness so become more aware of important cues
What did Johnson and Scott when using a low anxiety condition of grease and a pen and high anxiety condition of blood and a paper knife?
49% of ppts in the low anxiety condition could identify the man in a line up where as only 33% of ppts from the high anxiety condition could identify the man, this is because of the weapon focus effect
What did Valentine and Mesout find when investigating anxiety in the horror labyrinth at London dungeons?
75% of those who reported low anxiety identified the actor where as only 17% of those who reported high anxiety could identify the actor
What did Yuille and Cutshall find when studying the effect of anxiety on recall from a shooting at a gun shop in Vancouver?
those who reported high stress had 88% recall accuracy where as those who reported low anxiety only had a 75% accuracy
What is the yerkes-dodson law?
as anxiety increases performance increases but at a point performance begins to decrease and anxiety continues to increase
What are the criticisms of the yekres-dodson law?
too simplistic and anxiety is too difficult to define by just arousal it is also hard to measure accurately
What are the criticism of the weapon focus theory?
Pickle- the weapon focus test was a measure of surprise rather then anxiety as when he conducted an experiment using items in a hair salon recall was worse the odder the item
What are the problems with studying the effects of anxiety?
case studies- no control of post-event discussion
less control of extraneous variables
ethical issues- ppts protection from harm
