This is a 16-marker A level Psychology Essay on the prompt: 'Discuss research into the effects of anxiety on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.' This is a subtopic within Memory in Year 1 Content and this essay refers to key studies such as Johnson and Scott and Yuille and Cutshall. This essay c...
Discuss research into the effects of anxiety on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.
(16 marks)
Anxiety has been shown to reduce the accuracy of eyewitness testimonies. Johnson and Scott
investigated the weapon focus effect, which draws attention away from cues and towards the
weapon only to worsen recall. There was a low-anxiety condition in which participants in a
waiting room overheard a casual conversation and saw a man walking away with a grease-
covered pen. There was also a high anxiety condition where participants overheard a heated
argument, glass shattering and watched a man walk away with a bloody knife. After this event,
all participants were asked to identify the man from a selection of 50 photos. In the lower anxiety
condition, 49% of participants successfully identified the man compared to 33% in the high
anxiety condition. This study demonstrated how anxiety reduces the quality of eyewitness
testimony and particularly how the weapon focus effect prevents individuals from paying
attention to the man so any memory of his appearance doesn't enter the sensory register and
short-term memory.
This conclusion on the effect of anxiety may not be generalisable to all situations. Evdence from
Yuille and Cutshall’s study shows how anxiety may, in reality, increase the quality of eyewitness
testimony. The participants studied had experienced a real-life high-anxiety situation (a shooting
in a robbery) and were interviewed months after the incident. Their accounts were compared to
their initial testimony provided to the police with little difference in the details. Those who rated
their anxiety higher at the incident were able to provide more details than those who reported
being less anxious. This contradicts Johnson and Scott's study and reveals there may have
been limitations with the weapon focus experiment because it was an artificial situation in
comparison to the real-world robbery in Yuille and Cutshall’s study. Artificial tasks may result in
demand characteristics because participants may guess the aims of the study and change their
responses reducing internal validity.
However, it must be highlighted that Johnson Scott successfully controlled many extraneous
variables in their lab experiment. They controlled exactly what the participants experienced in
the high-anxiety condition and standardised the process to ensure that they all heard the same
events (an argument and glass breaking) in the same sequence. Yuille and Cutshall were
unable to control extraneous variables in the same way so the levels of anxiety participants
faced may have varied depending on, for example, how close they were to the thief or how
much of the shooting they observed. Additionally, participant variables such as IQ and ages
may have acted as confounding variables by increasing their recall ability. This means anxiety
may not have affected their memory at all.
Finally, it can be argued that Johnson and Scott’s experiment was unable to provide a holistic
understanding of the effect of anxiety. While this experiment shows anxiety is damaging to
eyewitness testimony, Yuille and Cutshall demonstrate anxiety can also be beneficial. This may
be better explained by the Yerkes-Dodson effect because it provides a more complete
explanation by arguing the optimal level of anxiety is within the medium range of arousal and
this is most beneficial for eyewitness testimony while both low and extreme levels are
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