Anxiety and EWT

Anxiety and EWT

1. Deffenbacher (1983)

   • Reviewed 21 studies and found that the stress-performance relationship the Yerkes-Dodson Curve (1908).
   • The Yerkes-Dodson Curve states that for tasks of moderate complexity (such as EWT), performance increases with stress up to an optimal point, where it starts to decline.
     • However, in 1987, Hardy and Frazey came up with the Catastrophe Model, which argues that performance increases with anxiety to a point at which you panic, where it declines very rapidly.

2. Anxiety or stress is almost always associated with real life crimes of violence.

3. Yuille and Cutshall (1986)

   • They found that witnesses of a real incident (a gun shooting outside a gun shop in Canada) had remarkably accurate memories of a stressful event involving weapons.
   • During the crime, a thief stole guns and money, but was shot six times and died.

4. Loftus (1979)

   • Participants were left waiting in a waiting area outside a lab.
     • One of 2 situations occured: first, they overheard an argument in the lab followed by a man leaving holding a pen with grease on his hands. In the second, they also heard breaking glass, and a man left holding a paper knife with blood on his hands.
       • When asked to identify the man from 50 photos, 49% correctly identified the man holding the pen, but only 33% correctly identified the man holding the knife.

5. Peters (1988)

   • Participants were visiting a health care for routine injections.
     • They were met by a researcher who recruited them for the study, and a nurse who gave their injections.
       • A week later, when asked to identify them, they were significantly more able to identify the researcher (low to moderate anxiety) than the nurse (high anxiety).

6. Christianson (1933)

   • 110 witnesses of 22 real life bank robberies showed that those who had been threatened had more accurate recall.
   • AO2: This study has high external validity, because this made use of real life events so this would give the most realistic representation of the effects of anxiety and stress on EWT.

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