Eyewitness Testimony: Anxiety

A01-Anxiety

• Anxiety = a state of emotional and physical arousal. The emotions include having worried thoughts and feelings of tension whilst physical changes include an increased heart rate and sweating. Anxiety is a normal reaction to stressful situations.

• Anxiety has strong physical and emotional effects

• A01-Negative Impacts of Anxiety

• Anxiety causes physiological arousal in the body which prevents us from paying attention to important cues, meaning that our recall is worse.

A01-Johnson & Scott (1976)

Procedure:

• Participants were led to believe they were going to take part in a lab study. Whilst sitting in a waiting room, participants heard an argument in the next room. There were two conditions in this experiment:

• In the ‘low-anxiety’ condition participants then saw a man walk through the waiting area, carrying a pen, with grease on his hands.

• In the ‘high-anxiety’ condition participants overheard the same argument, only this time it was accompanied by the sound of breaking glass. A man then walked through the waiting area, this time holding a paper knife that was covered in blood.

Findings:

• The participants later picked out the man from a set of 50 photos – 49% of participants who had seen the man carrying the pen were able to identify him. 

The corresponding figure for participants that had seen the man carrying the blood-covered knife was just 33%.

But why do we find this?

This can be explained through the ‘Tunnel Theory’ – the idea that participants were so anxious about the weapon that they focused on-that and nothing else, meaning that they could then not remember other details of the situation, such as the man’s face, when later asked to recall them.

A01-Positive Impacts of Anxiety

• Aim: To investigate the impact of anxiety on memory.

• The stress of witnessing a crime or accident creates anxiety through physiological arousal within the body. 

  The fight-or-flight response is triggered, which increases alertness

A01-Yuille & Cutshall (1986)

Procedure:

• Real-life study of a shooting in a gun shop in Vancouver, Canada – 21 individuals witnessed the shooting and 13 of them agreed to take part in the study.

• Individuals were interviewed 4-5 months after the incident and these interviews were compared with the original interviews conducted by the police at the time of the shooting.

• Accuracy was determined by the number of details reported in each account.

• The witnesses were also asked to rate how stressed they had felt at the time of the incident on a 7-point scale

Findings:

• The witnesses were very accurate in their accounts and there was little change in the level of accuracy after 5 months – though some details were less accurate such as recollection of the colour of items and age/weight/height estimates.

A03-Control in Field Studies

• Creating anxiety in participants is risky and potentially unethical because it may subject people to psychological harm purely for the purposes of research. This is why real-life studies are so beneficial – psychologists are able to interview people who have already witnessed a real-life event, so there is no need to create it.

This issue doesn’t challenge findings such as that of Johnson and Scott but it does question the need for such research.

A03-Anxiety or Surprise

• Johnson and Scott may have been testing surprise rather than anxiety. The reason participants focus on the weapon may have been because they were surprised by what they were seeing rather than because they were scared.

  
  

• Pickel (1998) conducted an experiment using scissors, a handgun, a wallet or a raw chicken as the hand-held items in a hairdressing salon video. Eyewitness accuracy was significantly poorer in the high unusualness conditions (chicken and handgun).

• A03-Measuring anxiety

Another limitation of research into anxiety and EWT is that the way it is measured may act as an extraneous variable. 

Carey Marr and colleagues (2021) considered the way that anxiety is measured in studies of anxiety and EWT. Anxiety may be measured subjectively (e.g. self-report) or objectively (e.g. recording physical changes in the body, such as heart rate). When both types of measure are used within the same study, the self-reported experience of anxiety doesn't always match the physiological changes being observed.

A03-Ethical issues

• Another limitation of research into anxiety and EWT is that the way it is measured may act as an extraneous variable. 

• Carey Marr and colleagues (2021) considered the way that anxiety is measured in studies of anxiety and EWT. Anxiety may be measured subjectively (e.g. self-report) or objectively (e.g. recording physical changes in the body, such as heart rate). When both types of measure are used within the same study, the self-reported experience of anxiety doesn't always match the physiological changes being observed.