Outline and evaluate research into how anxiety affects eye witness testimony
Outline and evaluate research into how anxiety affects eye witness testimony
Eye witness testimonies are accounts from witnesses to a crime or accident given as evidence in a court or to the police. Research into eye witness testimonies being affected by anxiety is mixed and It is believed that eye witness testimony is most accurate when the anxiety level is somewhere in between low and high anxiety. There is evidence to support that anxiety helps eye witness testimony. Yuille and Cutshall interviewed people who had witnessed a real life shooting and found that recall was very accurate despite high levels of anxiety, however, the people who were subjected to the highest levels of anxiety were nearest to the incident so would have been able to see more clearly what happened. There is also another study, Christianson and Hubinette, interviewed people who had witnessed genuine bank robberies and found that the people who had been subjected to the greatest anxiety had the most detailed and accurate recall. A strength of both of these studies is that they are naturalistic experiments, so have more ecological validity, but the study doesn’t take into account individual differences, because different people respond to anxiety in different ways.
There was also research showing that anxiety had a negative effect on testimonies. Loftus carried out a study containing two groups of participants who overheard either an argument, which was the violent scene or a discussion which was the peaceful scene, followed by a man leaving the room where the argument or discussion took place either holding a knife covered in blood (violent scene) or holding a pen with grease on his hands (peaceful scene). They found that people who witnessed the peaceful scene were better at identifying the man later. Loftus’s experiment was a lab experiment thus having less ecological validity than a naturalistic experiment, but it is more scientific and could be repeated, meaning more accurate
Eye witness testimonies are accounts from witnesses to a crime or accident given as evidence in a court or to the police. Research into eye witness testimonies being affected by anxiety is mixed and It is believed that eye witness testimony is most accurate when the anxiety level is somewhere in between low and high anxiety. There is evidence to support that anxiety helps eye witness testimony. Yuille and Cutshall interviewed people who had witnessed a real life shooting and found that recall was very accurate despite high levels of anxiety, however, the people who were subjected to the highest levels of anxiety were nearest to the incident so would have been able to see more clearly what happened. There is also another study, Christianson and Hubinette, interviewed people who had witnessed genuine bank robberies and found that the people who had been subjected to the greatest anxiety had the most detailed and accurate recall. A strength of both of these studies is that they are naturalistic experiments, so have more ecological validity, but the study doesn’t take into account individual differences, because different people respond to anxiety in different ways.
There was also research showing that anxiety had a negative effect on testimonies. Loftus carried out a study containing two groups of participants who overheard either an argument, which was the violent scene or a discussion which was the peaceful scene, followed by a man leaving the room where the argument or discussion took place either holding a knife covered in blood (violent scene) or holding a pen with grease on his hands (peaceful scene). They found that people who witnessed the peaceful scene were better at identifying the man later. Loftus’s experiment was a lab experiment thus having less ecological validity than a naturalistic experiment, but it is more scientific and could be repeated, meaning more accurate