MEMORY - ewt anxiety - topic 6.1

anxiety

- state of emotional and physical arousak
- worried thoughts, feelings of tension = emotional
- increased heart rate and sweating = physical
- unknown if it makes ew recall better or worse

negative: johnson and scott

- participants led to believe that they were to take part in a lab study
- whilst sitting in a waiting room, they heard an arguement in the next room
- cond 1 = low anxiety where a man walkwd through the waiting area carryinng a pen with grease on his hands
- cond 2 = high anxiety where ppts heard the arguement with the sound os breaking glass and man walked through with a knife covered in blood

- participants later picked out the man from a set of 50 photos
- 49% of low anxiety identified
- 33% of high anxiety identified

tunnel theory
- participants were so anxious about the weapon they focused on that and nothing else meaning they couldn't identify other details later on

anxiety having a positive effect

- flight or fight response increase alertness and improves memory as we become more aware of cues in the situation

positive: yuelle and cutshall

- real life study of a shooting in a gun shop in Vancouver
- 21 witnesses the shooting and 13 agreed to take part
- interviewed 4-5 months after incident and they were compared to original police interviews a the time
- accuracy determined by number of details
- also a skewed to rate how stressed were were on a 7-point scale and asked if they had any emotional problems since the incident such as sleeplessness

- accurate in their accounts but details such as colour of items, age, weight and height were less accurate
- highest levels of stress = 88%
- lowest = 75%
- anxety can improve an individual's memory

yerkes and dodson (1908)

- relationship between emotional arousal and performance looks like an inverted "U"

- deffenbacher (1983) applied the yerkes-dodson law to ewt
- lower levels of anxiety produce lower levels of recall
- as level of anxiety increases, memory becomes more accurate

- optimal level of anxiety is reached where memory is at maximum accuracy
- any more stress makes their recall suffer a drastic decline

EVAL - weapons focus effect

- johnson ans scott testing surprise rather than anxiety
- focus on weapon could have been due to surprise rather than anxiety
- pickel (1998) = using scissors, a handgun, a wallet and raw chicken as he and-held items in a hairdressing salon video
- ew accuracy was poorer in unusual condition (raw chicken an handgun)
- due to unusualness so no information of effects of anxiety

EVAL - ethical issues

- creating anxiety in participants is unethical because it may subject people to psychological harm just for research
- this is why real-life studies are beneficial because there's no need to recreate it
- doesn't challenge findings but questions the need for such research
- one reasons is to compare findings with less controlled file studies but s questionable to whether benefits outweigh ethics

EVAL - alternative model

- fazey and hardy (1998) propose an alternative model for relationships between anxiety and performance
- catastrophe theory predicts that when psychological arousal increases beyond the optimum level, the inverted U hypothesis predicts a gradual decrease in performance
- however, they observed that theres a catastrophic decline which is due to mental activity (worry)
- the inverted U only describe increase in psychological anxiety

EVAL - demand characteristics

- most lab studies show ppts a filmed and usually staged crime
- many will be aware that they are watching it for a reason to do with the study
- chances are most of them will work for themselves that they will be asked questions about what they have just seen