EWT: Anxiety

Question 1

Johnson and Scott(1976)

Answer 1

-Studied the effect of anxiety on ear
-Told participants they were going to partake in a lab study.
-Participants were placed in a waiting room and two conditions were created:
High anxiety - argument heard in the other room, followed by glass breaking and man walking out with paper knife covered in blood.
Low anxiety - no breaking glass after argument and man held a pen covered in grease instead of a bloody paper knife.
-Participants then had to pick the correct image of the man from a set of 50 photos, 49% of those in the lox anxiety condition could successfully identify him, whereas only 33% of those could identify the man in the high anxiety condition.

Question 2

Yuille and Cutshall(1986)

Answer 2

-Conducted a study of a real life shooting in a gun shop in Vancouver.
-13 of 21 witnesses agreed to partake in the study.
-Interviews were held 4-5 months after the incident and were compared with the original interviews taken at the time of the shooting.
-Accuracy was dictated by how many details they could report, participants were also asked how stressed they were on a 7-Point scale and asked if they had any emotional issues since the shooting.
-There was little change of the recollection of the event in the 5 month interview, with a few minor things muddled. Those who reported higher stress were also found to be more accurate too (88% percent compared to 75%)

Question 3

Yerkes Dodson law

Answer 3

-The concept that the relationship between emotional arousal and performance makes an ‘inverted U shape.’
-In the context of EWT it states that at low levels of anxiety recall accuracy is low, and it increases as stress levels increases.
-recall accuracy increases with stress up until a point where max accuracy is reached and accuracy decreases again past that point of stress.

Question 4

Pickel(1998)(EWT AO3)

Answer 4

-Studied how much unusualness effects recall of an event.
-Found the high unusualness low anxiety condition to have significantly poorer accuracy.
-Shows that weapon focus effecting ewt id to do with unusualness rather than anxiety, and tells us nothing about it’s effects on EWT.

Question 5

Yerkes and Dodson(AO3)(EWT)

Answer 5

-The inverted U explanation is too simplistic.
-Anxiety is difficult to define in one element, inverted U assumes only physiological effects will lead to a change in performance.
-This is flawed as there are several other elements of anxiety that may equally have an effect on EWT but Yerkes Dodson is too limited of an explanation for this.