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What type of effect can anxiety have on EWT?
Negative - makes recall worse
Positive - improves recall
Johnson & Scott
- anxiety has a negative effect
- Weapon focus
- ppts told they were part of a different experiment
- 2 conditions:
- ppts heard an argument and see a man walk out with a knife and bloody hands (anxiety)
- ppts hear an argument and see a man walk out with a pen and ink on his hands (non anxiety)
- ppts had to identify the man
- recall in pen condition was 49%
- recall in knife condition was 33%
Yuille & Cutshall
- anxiety has a positive effect
- ppts had witnessed a real shooting 5 months prior
- ppts had to rate how anxious they were on a scale from 1-7
- ppts recall was compared to their original police interviews after the incident
- those who rated higher anxiety were more accurate in their recall
What is the Yerkes-Dodson law?
Anxiety's effect on EWT is an inverted 'U' shape. There is an optimal point of anxiety but anything lower or higher than this negatively effects recall.
Limitations (Johnson & Scott)
- Johnson & Scott may not have been testing anxiety but rather unusualness
Strengths
- Research support for both negative and positive effects
