– Stressful situations create anxiety, crimes and accidents are no exception
– Anxiety is a state of emotional and physical arousal.
– The emotions include having worried thoughts and feelings of tension whilst physical changes include an increased heart rate and sweating.
– It is not clear whether these effects make eyewitness recall better or worse.
ANXIETY HAS A NEGATIVE EFFECT ON ACCURACY
– Anxiety creates physiological arousal in the body which prevents us paying attention to important cues, so recall is worse.
– One approach to study this is to look at the effect of weapons on accuracy of recall of the witness.
– Johnson and Scott (1976) studied anxiety’s effect on recall
PROCEDURE
– They led participants to believe they were taking part in a lab study.
– While seated in a waiting room participants heard an argument in the next room.
– In the low anxiety condition a man then walked through the waiting area, carrying a pen and with grease on his hands.
– In the high-anxiety condition a man walked out of the room carrying a paper knife that was covered in blood.
– The participants later had the chance to pick out the man from a set of 50 photos.
FINDINGS
– 49% of the participants in the low-anxiety condition identified him.
– 33% of the participants in the high-anxiety condition identified him.
– The presence of a weapon caused attention to be physically drawn towards the weapon itself and away from other things (eg. the persons face)
– The tunnel theory of memory argues that witness’s attention narrows to focus on a weapon, because it is a source of anxiety.
ANXIETY HAS A POSITIVE EFFECT ON ACCURACY
– The stress of witnessing a crime creates anxiety through physiological arousal of the body.
– The flight-or-fight response is triggered which increases our alertness and improves our memory for the event because we become more aware of cues in the situation.
– This is an evolutionary argument as it suggests that it would be adaptive to remember events that are emotionally important so that you could identify similar situations in the future and know how to respond
– Yuille and Cutshall (1986) studied the effects of anxiety on recall
PROCEDURE
– They conducted a study of a real-life shooting in a gun shop in Vancouver, Canada.
– The shop owner shot a thief dead.
– There were 21 witnesses and 13 of them agreed to take part in the study.
– The interviews were held 4-5 months after the 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 in each account as well as the witnesses being asked to self report how stressed they had felt at the time of the incident.
FINDINGS
– They found that the witnesses were very accurate in their accounts and there was little change in the amount of accuracy after 5 months.
– Those participants who reported the highest levels of stress were most accurate, 88% compared to 75% for the less stressed group
CONCLUSIONS
– According to Yerkes and Dodson the relationship between emotional arousal and performance looks like an ‘inverted U’.
– Lower levels of anxiety produce lower levels of recall accuracy.
– But memory becomes more accurate as the level of anxiety experienced increases.
– However, there comes a point where the optimal level of anxiety is reached which is the maximum accuracy.
– If an eyewitness experiences any more stress than this, then their recall of the event suffers a drastic decline.
EVALUATION OF ANXIETY
LIMITATIONS
Weapon Focus May Not Be Relevant
– A criticism of the weapon focus effect comes from Pickle
– He proposed that the reduced accuracy of identification could be due to surprise rather than anxiety
– To test this she arranged for participants to watch a thief enter a hairdressing salon in four conditions
– 1 – Carrying scissors (High threat, low suprise), 2 – A handgun (High threat, high surprise)
– 3 – A wallet (Low threat, low surprise) 4 – A whole chicken (Low threat, high surprise)
– Identification was least accurate in the high surprise conditions rather than high threat.
– This supports the view that the weapon focus effect is related to surprise rather than anxiety
Field Studies Lack Control
– Researchers usually interview real-life eyewitnesses sometime after the event.
– All sorts of things will have happened to the participants in the meantime that the researchers have no control over.
– This is a limitation of field research because it is possible that these extraneous variables may be responsible for the accuracy of recall.
– The effects of anxiety may be overwhelmed by these other factors, and impossible to assess by the time the participants are interviewed.
Individual Differences
– It has been suggested that one extraneous variable in many studies of anxiety is emotional sensitivity.
– In a study by Bothwell et al, participants were tested for personality characteristics and was labelled as either neurotic or stable.
– It was found that the stable participants showed rising levels of accuracy as stress levels increased
– Whereas, the opposite was true for neurotics as the accuracy levels decreased as stress increased.
– Deffenbacher et al points out that the effect sizes show in many studies of anxiety may be the result of averaging out low accuracy and high accuracy scores of sensitive and non-sensitive participants respectively.
– These studies suggest that individual differences may indeed play an important role in the accuracy of eyewitness testimony