eyewitness testimony - anxiety

Question 1

what is anxiety?

Answer 1

an unpleasant emotional state often accompanied by physiological arousal e.g shaking, swearing, increased heart rate.

Question 2

what does anxiety cause?

Answer 2

anxiety causes the weapon focus effect - the weapon distracts attention from other features because of the fear of harm it creates.

Question 3

anxiety has a negative effect on recall: Johnson and Scott

Answer 3

bloody knife vs greasy pen:
Ps are sat in waiting room when argument kicks off next door.
- someone comes in waiting room holding a bloody knife.
- someone come in waiting room holding a greasy pen.
- 49 percent of people recalled more of what they saw when someone comes in with greasy pen and only 33 percent recalled when someone comes in with bloody knife.
(two independent groups)

Question 4

anxiety had a positive effect on recall: Christiansen and Hubbinerte

Answer 4

Bank robbery:
natural experiment - 58 participants/ eyewitnesses.
- condition 1: victims of bank robbery (bank tellers) high anxiety.
- condition 2: in the room at the time, low anxiety.
- interviewed 4-15 months later.
condition 1 had best recall compared to condition 2.

Question 5

what does the Yerkes and Dodson law suggest?

Answer 5

high peak and low peak anxiety showed poor recall but medium (optimum anxiety) recalled the best.

Question 6

evaluation

Answer 6

high ecological validity - done in real life settings so its generalisable to real life behaviours.
lack of control of extraneous variables - participants could have been influenced by post event discussion which can affect their memory and recall (misleading info)
- cannot establish cause and effect, as cannot control distance between incident and each participant.

Question 7

further evaluation 1

Answer 7

there are individual differences in memory recall:
neurotic - tend to become more quickly stressed.
stable - less emotionally sensitive.
- neurotic tends to be less accurate as stress increases, stable participants more accurate as stress increases.
- researchers interview people some time after event, however people could forget, or discuss with one another to change their views (misleading info) - LTM is being tested so inference could have occurred which reduces validity.

Question 8

further evaluation 2

Answer 8

weapon focus may not be caused by anxiety but by surprise (Pickel study):
- participants were at hairdressers when a person came in holding an object, they were asked to identify them.
- objects were:
wallet - low threat, low surprise
gun - high threat, high surprise
scissors - high threat, low surprise
raw chicken - low threat, high surprise
participants recalled objects highest to lowest in this order: chicken, gun, scissors, wallet.
- this suggests that anxiety is not the only psychological response that causes weapon focus effect.