EWT: anxiety

EWT: anxiety

1. anxiety

   • a state of physical and emotional arousal and is a normal reaction to stressful situations but can impact the accuracy and detail of recall

2. negative effect on recall

   • creates psychological arousal that prevents us from paying attention to important cues
   • johnson and scott 1976
     • lead people to believe they were taking part in a lab study
     • participants sat in a waiting room and heard a heated argument
       • condition 1 man came out with a pen and grease on his hands
       • condition 2 heard breaking glass and a man came out with a paper knife covered in blood
     • findings
       • participants had to pick out the man from 50 photos
         • low anxiety was able to identify the man
         • high anxiety only 33%

3. positive effect on recall

   • fight or flight is triggered which increases the alertness and improves memory
   • Yuille and Cutshall carried out a study of a real-life shooting in a gun shop
     • 21 witnesses and 13 agreed to take part
     • interviewed 4-5 months after the incident
     • accuracy is determined by the number of accurate details reported
     • asked how stressed they were using a 7 point scale and any other emotional problems
     • findings
       • people who reported highest stress were the most accurate (88%)

4. explaining contradictory evidence

   • Yerkes and Dodson 1908 suggested there is a relationship between emotional arousal and performance (inverted u).
   • Dieffenbacher 1983 applied this law to EWT and found low anxiety lead to lower accuracy in recall than
   • increased stress will lead to higher accuracy up to a point whereafter accuracy delcline

5. evaluation

   • weapon focus effect may not be relevant
     • johnson and Scott suggested individuals could have been surprised by the weapon rather than scared. pickle 1998 conducted an experiment with scissors a handgun a wallet or raw chicken as handheld items in a hair salon and found accuracy was poorer in the high unusualness condition. this suggests the weapon focus effect is due to unusualness so doesn't tell us much about the effect of the anxiety of EWT
   • field studies sometimes lack control
     • when researchers interview real-life eyewitnesses sometime after the vent things could have happened in the meantime which they have no control over such as post-event discussion. this is a limitation as extraneous variables are responsible for the accuracy of recall. the effects of anxiety may be overwhelmed by other factors and so it is impossible to assess by the time the participants are interviewed
   • ethical issues
     • it subjects people to pscychological harm for research. real life studies are important as people can be interviewed who have witnessed real-life events. this doesn't challenge the findings from johnson and Scott but does question the need for research as finding are compared with less controlled field studies so the benefits might outweigh the issues
   • the inverted u explaantion is too simplistic
     • anxiety is hard to define and measure the accuracy as cognitive, behavioural, emotional and physical elements are involved. the inverted u assumes only physiological arousal is linked to psychological arousal