EWT: Anxiety Flashcards
What did Johnson + Scott study ?
- filed experiment, independent group design
- self-selected sampling
- participants put in waiting room
- low anxiety: casual conversation, saw a man holding a pen
- high anxiety: heated arguments + man with a bloody knife
What does anxiety create in a positive way ?
- a physiological arousal - fight/flight response which creates alertness
What did Yuille + Cutshall ?
natural experiment
- actual shooting in gun shop, Toronto
- shop owner shot a thief and killed him
- 21 witnesses and 13 took part
- participants were interviewed after 4-5 months
- compared these interviews to original police interviews
- accuracy based on number of details reported in each interview
- rated stress from 1-8
- reported any emotional disturbances
Finings:
- little change in accounts
- some details = less accurate
- high stress levels = more accurate = 88%
- shows anxiety can improve accuracy of recall
What did Yerkes and Dodson say ?
- They said that the relationship between emotional arousal and performance looks like an inverted U
- If arousal is too low or high performance will be lower
What is a limitation of anxiety as a negative effect on EWT ?
- Johnson and Scott may not have tested anxiety
- Pickel - conducted an experiment using scissors, handgun, wallet or raw chicken
- Eye-witness accuracy was much poorer in the high unusualness conditions
- Suggests weapon focus effect is due to unusualness
What are the strengths of the explanations of anxiety during EWT ?
Negative effects supporting study:
- Valentine and Mesout supports weapon focus
- used heart-rate to divide participants into high and low anxiety groups
- high anxiety disrupted recall details about the actor in the London Dungeon
Support for positive effects:
- Christianson and Hubinette
- 58 witnesses to actual bank robberies
- recall was more than 75% across all witnesses
- The direct (most anxious) had the highest recall rates
