Summary
Summary Factors Affecting Eye Witness Testimony - Anxiety
Looking at the studies into how anxiety affects eye-witness testimony, the studies that support this, and the evaluation for it.
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Eye Witness Testimony: AnxietyMemory
Key Names
Johnson and Scott (1976)
Key Words
Anxiety –
Negative effect of anxiety-Johnson and Scott (1976)
A state of emotional
and physical arousal. Procedure - The researchers led the participants to believe that they will take part in a lab study. While
seated in a waiting room, participants 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 the “high-anxiety”
condition, participants also heard the same argument, but accompanied by the sound of breaking glass and
a man walking out of the room, holding a paper knife that was covered in blood. Later, the participants had
to pick out the man from a set of 50 photos.
Findings - 49% of the participants from the “low-anxiety” condition were able to identify him while 33% of
participants from the “high-anxiety” condition were able to identify him. Tunnel theory argues that the
participants in the high anxiety situation focused more on the weapon than the individual.
Positive effect of anxiety - Yuille and Cutshall
(1986)
Procedure - They interviewed witnesses of a real-life incident 4-5 months after the incident. These were
compared to the initial interviews with the police, made at the time of the shooting. Witnesses were also
asked to rate how stressed they felt at the time of the incident, using a 7-point scale and were asked about
any emotional problems they had since the event, e.g. sleeplessness.
Findings - After 5 months, the witnesses were very accurate in their accounts, in terms of accuracy and
amount. Participants who were the most accurate reported to have experienced the highest levels of stress
(88% compared to 75% of less-stressed witnesses). Some details, such as, colour of items, age, height,
weight estimates were less accurate.
Explaining the contradiction
Yerkes and Dodson (1908) suggested that the relationship between emotional arousal and performance
looks like an “inverted U”. Deffenbacher (1983) reviewed 21 studies and found that the stress-performance
relationship followed an inverted-U function. This means that for tasks of moderate complexity (such as
EWT), performances increase with stress up to an optimal point where it starts to decline.
Evaluation
Weapon focus effect may not be relevant - Pickel (1998) conducted an experiment using scissors, a
handgun, a wallet or a raw chicken as handheld items in a hairdressing salon video. EWT accuracy was
significantly poorer in high unusualness conditions (raw chicken and handgun).
Field studies sometimes lack control – Researchers have no control over variables that could influence
EWT, e.g. post-event discussion could be an extraneous variable. Effects of anxiety may be overwhelmed
by these factors.
Ethical issues – Creating anxiety within people is risky as it may be seen as causing participants
psychological harm purely for the purpose of research.
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