Flashcards
Memory: Factors Affecting EWT: Anxiety
Cards in this deck (9)
- 1What is Anxiety?A state of emotional and physical arousal. Emotions include worried and tense thoughts. Physical may be increase heart rate and sweat. Anxiety is a normal reaction to stressful situations but can affect accuracy and detail of EWT.
- 2ANXIETY HAS A NEGATIVE EFFECT ON RECALL: Anxiety creates physiological arousal in the body which prevents us paying attention to important cues, so recall is worse. Johnson and Scott did research on this. They made participants believe that they were going to take part in a lab study. Low anxiety condition: while seated in a waiting room, they heard an argument in another room. A man walked out into the waiting area with a pen and greasy hands. High anxiety condition: same argument with broken glass sound but a man walked into the waiting room with a paper knife in blood.ANXIETY HAS A NEGATIVE EFFECT ON RECALL:
Results: participants later picked out the man from 50 photos. 49% who had seen the man with the pen were able to identify him. 33% for the other condition were able to identify the man. Tunnel theory of memory states that witness' attention narrows to focus on weapon as it is a source of anxiety. - 3ANXIETY HAS A POSTIVE EFFECT ON RECALL: Stress of witnessing a crime creates anxiety through physiological arousal. Fight or flight response is triggered which increases alertness and improves memory of event as we become more aware of the cues in the situation. Yuille and Cutshall conducted a study of a real shooting in a gun shop. The shop owner shot a thief dead. 21 witnesses, 13 agreed to take part in a study. Interview was 4-5 months after crime and these were compared with police interviews made at the time. Asked how stressed they were at the time and if they had any emotional problems since.ANXIETY HAS A POSITIVE EFFECT ON RECALL:
Findings: Witness were accurate and little change in amount and accuracy after 5 months. But details like hair colour and height were less accurate. 88% who reported accurately were high stressed. - 4Explaining the Contradictory FindingsYerkes and Dodson said the relationship between emotional arousal and performance was an inverted U. Deffenbacher applied this law to EWT. Lower levels of anxiety produce lower levels of recall accuracy. But memory becomes more accurate as anxiety rises. Optimum anxiety level is max accuracy. If any more stress then event recall suffers drastic decline.
- 5Evaluation: Weakness: Weapon Focus Effect May Not Be RelevantJohnson and Scott's experiment may test surprise rather than anxiety. They may be surprised at seeing the weapon, not scared. Pickel did experiment with scissors, hand gun and a wallet or raw chicken as hand held items in a hairdressing salon video. EW accuracy was poor in unusual conditions: raw chicken and hand gun as you wouldn't expect those items in a hairdressing salon so surprise. Suggests that weapon focus effect is due to unusualness rather than anxiety and therefore tells us nothing specifically about effects of anxiety on EWT.
- 6Evaluation: Weakness: Field Studies Sometimes Lack ControlResearchers usually interview real life eyewitnesses sometime after the event. Yuille and Cutshall did it after 4-5 months and it is a limitation. This is because all sorts of things would have happened to the participants in the meantime that the researchers had no control over: discussions with other people about the event, PED. These extraneous variables could have been resonsible for the accuracy of recall.
- 7Evaluation: Weakness: Ethical IssuesIn Johnson and Scott's experiment they created anxiety in participants and this is risky. It may lead to psychological harm. However in Yuille and Ctushall's experiment it was a real life study so it was beneficial as they were interviewing people who had witnessed a real event and there was no need to create it.
- 8Evaluation: Weakness: Inverted U Explanation Is Too SimplisticThe Yerkes Dodson Law of the inverted U is too simplistic as anxiety is very difficult to define and measure accurately. It has many elements: cogntive, behavioural, physical and emotional. But this law only considers the physiological arousal.
- 9Evaluation: Weakness: Demand Characteristics Operate in Lab Studies of AnxietyMost lab studies show participants a staged crime. The participants will be aware they are watching a filmed crime and they would figure out what the researchers are going to do: ask the questions about the film.
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- A level Memory Flashcards on Memory: Factors Affecting EWT: Anxiety, created by Christolin Calistas on 27/03/2021.
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- Christolin Calistas
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