Factors Affecting EWT: Anxiety Flashcards
(11 cards)
Define anxiety
A state of emotional and physical arousal, emotions may include worries or thoughts and physical characteristics may include sweating and a increased heart rate
What is the inverted u theory
Yerkes and Dodson came up with the inverted u theory
It states that at low levels of anxiety, memory will be at a low level but as anxiety increases so does recall accuracy until it reaches an optimal level, where any further increase in anxiety leads to a drop in their memory accuracy
Describe the procedure for research of anxiety having a negative affect on recall
Johnson and Scott: weapon focus effect/ tunnel theory
Told pps they were taking part in a lab study and were told to sit in a waiting room (this was part of the experiment) unbeknownst to them , they were places in either of 2 conditions, low anxiety or high anxiety, depending on which they were in, they were going to witness a diff scene in the waiting room.
Condition 1: low anxiety pps heard and argument in the room next to them and saw a man walk in with oil on his hand
Condition 2: high anxiety, pps heard the same argument but with the sound of breaking glass and a man walking into the room with a bloody knife (paper)
Pps were then asked to identify the man from 50 photographs
What were the findings for research of anxiety having a negative affect on recall
Johnson and Scott
49% of pps from the low anxiety condition were able to correctly identify the man compared to only 33% from the high anxiety condition
This was because anxiety was caused by the weapon, weapon focus effect, where pps focused all their attention on weapon instead of any other details, making recall difficult
Give supporting research for Johnson and scott research of anxiety having a negative affect on recall
Loftus et al. (1987) showed participants a series of slides of a customer in a restaurant.
In one version, the customer was holding a gun, in the other the same customer held a checkbook.
Participants who saw the gun version tended to focus on the gun. As a result, they were less likely to identify the customer in an identity parade those who had seen the checkbook version.
Describe the research for anxiety having a positive affect on recall
Yuille and cutshall conducted a study of a real life shooting in a gun shop and tested the recall of 13 witnesses (field exp)
They conducted interviews 4-5 months after in incident and were compared with the original police interviews made at the time of the shooting
Accuracy was determined by the number of details reported and they asked witnesses to rate how stressed they were at the time
What were the findings of research on anxiety having a positive affect on recall
Witnesses were very accurate in their accounts and there was little change
Pps who reported the highest amount of stress were the most accurate (88% compared to 75% for the less stressed)
What are the 4 evaluation points
- weapon focus affect may not be relevant
- field studies lack control
+ feild studies have high ecological validity - ethical issues
Evaluation: - weapon focus affect may not be relevant
Weapons can cause surprise and unusualness not always anxiety. Johnso and Scott’s study may reflect surprise and not fear. Pickel found that eyewitness accuracy dropped when unusual items like chicken or a handgun was used, suggesting that the effect is due to an usual item
Evaluation: - feild studies may lack control, + positive of feild studies
Bcs many extraneous variables e.g post event discussion can affect eyewitness memory. These uncontrolled factors may influence recall more than anxiety, making it hard to isolate anxiety’s true affect on EWT
+ feild studies also have high ecological validity because they take place in a realistic setting, which increases validity of the results
Evaluation: - ethical issues
There are ethical issues when creating anxiety in research as it may cause psychological harm. Real life studies avoid this by using natural events. While ethics don’t invalidate studies like Johnson’s and Scott’s, they do raise questions about whether such research is nessasary . However comparing lab and feild studies can be valuable and benefits can outweigh negatives
