(Psy) Discuss How Anxiety Can Affect The Accuracy Of Eye Witness Testimony

Anxiety can affect the accuracy of eye witness testimony due to the fact that the level of anxiety disturbs the amount of research that can be recalled back at a later date.

As shown in the Yerkes-Dobson effect, anxiety can have both a positive and negative effect on memory recall due to its curvilinear correlation. Despite the fact that the weapon focus effect will assist in helping to identify the weapon, it may hinder the chances of finding the criminal in question. This is due to the fact that when threatened, similar to the fight or flight reaction, people focus on how to survive and thus put all their attention on to the possible danger, in this case being the weapon.

In 1987 Loftus and others created an experiment where individuals sat in a waiting room prior to a psychological experiment in which two different scenarios took place, one with a man walking through with a pen and grease on his hands, the other being a man leaving with a blood stained knife. When they were then asked to identify from a selection of fifty photographs which person had done these tasks, 49% correctly identified the man holding the pen and only 33% identified the man with the bloodstained knife. This demonstrates how people focus on the weapon as opposed to the individual themselves, so it could estimate that only one third of eyewitness testimonies will accurately present a description of the true perpetrator.

This is criticised by a 1999 theory from Pickel in which he suggested that the level of anxiety does not affect the level of recall and is instead caused by an element of surprise. They state that witnesses give poorer descriptions of a priest with a gun as opposed to a police officer with a gun, commenting on the fact that it is not the gun that causes the recall of false and distorted memories but the unexpected and unusual presence of it.

However, in a contrasting experiment which findings demonstrate that anxiety causes a positive effect was conducted in 1993 by Christianson and Hubinette. They questioned 58 witnesses of a real bank robbery, both cashiers and bystanders, resulting in the findings of this experiment showing that those who had been threatened in some way had more accurate recall developing into the belief that they had the perfect amount of anxiety in order to achieve a valuable eye witness testimony.

This is supported by Riniolo and others who in 2003, looked back on the tragic event of the Titanic and read the eyewitness testimonies from the survivors, gathering the understanding that despite the trauma of the event they still were able to provide an accurate account.

Therefore, in conclusion anxiety can affect the accuracy of eye witness testimony in both a positive and negative way due to the levels of arousal experienced at the time. With small to medium increases in the level of apprehension assisting memory and high levels decreasing it.