Mem: EWT- anxiety

Question 1

What is anxiety?

Answer 1

-emotional state where we fear something bad will happen
-happens in stressful situations
-anxiety is accompanied w/ physiological arousal (quicker heart rate/shallow breathing)

Question 2

What does the Yerkes Dodson Law show?

Answer 2

-medium anxiety boosts performance- focused and engaged
-anxiety can have a pos/neg effect on someone’s ability to accurately recall EWT

Question 3

Negative effect of anxiety?

Answer 3

-anxiety creates physiological arousal in body- prevents us paying attention of important cues- recall is worse
-one approach to studying anxiety + EWT looks at effect of weapons (create anxiety) on recall accuracy
-called weapon focus

Question 4

What is the weapons focus effect?

Answer 4

-where in violent crimes, arousal may focus the witness on more central details of the attack (e.g. weapon)
-focus less on peripheral details (e.g. what else was going on/what perp looked like)
-Johnson + Scott 1976

Question 5

Johnson and Scott- procedure

Answer 5

-ppts thought they were in a lab study, then heard an argument in the next room
-in a low-anxiety condition, a man walked through the waiting area carrying a pen with grease on his hands
-in a high-anxiety one, the argument had the sound of breaking glass, and a man walked out holding a paper knife covered in blood

Question 6

Johnson and Scott findings

Answer 6

-ppts picked out the man from a set of 50 photos, 49% of the low-anxiety condition correctly identified him
-only 33% had accurate EWT in the high-anxiety condition
-the Tunnel Theory of memory argues a witness’ attention narrows to focus on a weapon- source of anxiety

Question 7

AO3 demand characteristics-

Answer 7

-lab exps. investigating effect of anxiety on mem. recall (EWT) is often criticized for d.c’s
-ppl expecting smth to happen, or if seen a video clip, they could guess they will be asked info

Question 8

Yuille and Cutshall (1986)- hypothesis

Answer 8

anxiety has a positive affect on EWT

Question 8

Yuille and Cutshall- procedure

Answer 8

-studied a real life shooting in a gun shop in Canada- shop owner shot/killed a thief-
-21 witnesses, 13 took part in study 4-5 months after og incident + were compared w/ og police interviews at time of the shooting, acc. was determined by no. of details in each interview
-ppts asked to rate how stressed they felt at the time on a 7-point scale + asked if they had any emotional problems since event (e.g. sleeplessness)

Question 9

Yuille and Cutshall findings

Answer 9

-ppts were very accurate in their accounts- little changes in the EWT after 5 months
-ppts who reported highest lvls of stress were most accurate
-88% compared to 75% for the less-stressed group

Question 10

Anxiety has positive effect

Answer 10

-Yuille and Cutshall looks at how it can have a positive effect on recall