The Effects of Anxiety on EWT and The cognitive interview Flashcards
what is anxiety?
A cognitive emotion
when may EWT recall be affected and what does this mean?
during initial coding of information- means emotional state, caused by high anxiety can negatively affect how we store and encode the info- affecting how accurately we can recall the right info
What do laboratory studies in general demonstrate about anxiety?
High anxiety leads to the poorest accuracy- however we don’t tend to find the same results in real life.
When is it believed that eyewitness testimony is the most accurate?
when the anxiety level is somewhere in between low and high (yerkes and dodson curve)
What does the Yerkes-Dodson Cyre suggest?
High Anxiety- Bad recall
Medium Anxiety- Best recall
Low Anxiety- Poor recall
What is a different account of why anxiety may reduce the accuracy of EWT?
The Weapons focus effect
What is the weapons focus effect?
(effect, not factor, anxiety is)
-The view that our weapon in a criminals hands distracts attention (because of the anxiety it creates) from other features and therefore reduces accuracy of identification
What was Johnson and Scott (1976) aim?
To investigate whether high levels of anxiety would affect accuracy of recall
what is the procedure of Johnson and Scott?
-Used 2 experimental methods (one with weapon, one without- participants asked to sit outside the room where they thought they heard a genuine discussion between two people
What was the Low anxiety (no weapon ) condition?
-The conversation was peaceful about some office equipment, when they were finished, a man emerged, holding a pen with grease on his hands
what was the high anxiety (With weapon) condition?
-The conversation was more heated, participants had breaking glass, and a man emerged, holding a knife covered in blood
What was the DV for Johnson and Scott? (1976)
The number of correct identifications made of the man from 50 photographs
What were the findings of Johnson and Scott? (1976)
-In low Anxiety condition, 49% were able to accurately, identify the man holding a pen from the photographs
-In high anxiety (with weapon), memory recall was much less- 33% accuracy
What is Johnson and Scott’s conclusion?
-This suggests the weapon may have distracted attention from the person holding it- this therefore may explain why eye witnesses sometimes have poor recall for certain violent crimes involving weapons where may be heightened
- negatively impacts accuracy of ewt
What is Loftus and Burns (1982) procedure?
-participants watched a film of a simulated robbery
-Someone watched a non-violent version than some watched a violent version (where a boy was shot in the face)
what were loftus and burns 1982 findings?
-When questioned afterwards, those who watched the non violent condition recalled significantly more details of the crime than those who watch the violent condition
what was the conclusion of Loftus and Burns 1982?
it seems that the shock of the event had heightened arousal and therefore disrupted memory storage of the details before and after the violent scene
What is the cognitive interview?
-police technique for interviewing witnesses to a crime which encourages them to re-create the original context, using four structured stages
-This increases the accessibility of the stored information
What is the standard interview?
- A-Z account
- Poor accuracy
-Leading questions
-Interruptions
what does the cognitive interview do to schemas?
Tries to disrupt
What are the three techniques of the cognitive interview?
-context, reinstatement
-Report everything
-Recall from changed perspective
-Recall in reverse order
what is context reinstatement?
-interviewer encourages theinterviewee to mentally recreate the environment (including the weather, the lighting,distinctive smells, any people nearby), and how they were feeling, by asking the interviewee to think back to before, during and after the event.
Why does context reinstatement work?
It is believed if there is mental consistency between the actual incident and the recreated situation, there is an increased likeliness that witnesses will recall more details, and be more accurate in their recall.
-Appropriate contextual and emotional cues help them retrieve the memories (linked to context and state dependent forgetting)
What is report everything? (don’t use if you don’t need to)
Report every detail about the event that you can recall even if it seems trivial or irrelevant. Do not edit anything out.
Information about the event should be reported on, even if it does not seem to have a bearing on the crime.
