Eyewitness Testimony: Anxiety

A01:

Anxiety is often accompanied by fast heartbeat, sweaty palms and dilated pupils. There is research into anxiety into eyewitness testimony to investigate its effect on recall.

Johnson and Scott - asked participants to sit in a waiting room -> participants thought they were going to wait for their experiment (but they were actually already participating in the experiment). An arguement was heard from another room, and then a man walked out of that room either with: (1) A knife covered in blood in his hands or (2) a pen covered in grease in his hands. Afterwards,participants were given 50 photographs of different men. They had to pick which was the one who walked out of the room.                                                                             

Findings: participants in condition (1) were 33% accurate in identifying the man. Participants in condition (2) were 49% accurate in identifying the man.                                                                 

Conclusion: therefore shows that anxiety has a negative effect on recall ability.   

Weapon-focus effect -> the idea that weapons cause us to concentrate on them, leading to the inability to accurately recall other details.                     

Yuille and Cutshall -> The study was a natural experiment in which there was a criminal event There were 13 participants that were gathered using opportunity sampling.                          Yuille and Cutshall asked the participants to recall the event and also to rate their anxiety…