Outline and Evaluate Research Into the Affect of Anxiety On the Accuracy of Eye Witness Testimony (6+6)

Eyewitness Testimony refers to witnesses who are asked to give testimonies in court or police interviews to particular crimes. Eyewitness Testimony consists of : the eyewitness encoding the information they have witnessed the very second it happened, making sure they are describing the order of the events and the people involved. It also consists of the witness retaining information for a period of time (this can be a very long time) and finally it consists of the witness retrieving the information whilst they are in court. Eyewitness Testimony does have real life applicability as many people through DNA and false witnesses are sent to prison for crimes they did not commit therefore it is important to fully understand EWT to avoid innocent people being wrongfully punished. Eye witness testimonies are affected by a number of factors, but the one that I am going to focus on is anxiety. Many different laboratory studies and some ‘real life’ studies have generally shown recall is less accurate in people who have witnessed particularly distressing or anxiety filled situations. The weapon focus effect was created by Loftus (1979), she asked participants to sit outside a laboratory where they thought they were waiting to participate in an experiment, but they were actually already in it. As they were 'waiting', they heard a discussion between two people inside the laboratory. In one group, participants heard a discussion about an equipment failure, a man then appeared from the room with greasy hands holding a pen. In the other group, participants heard a hostile discussion, followed by the sound of breaking glass and overturned furniture, a man then emerged from the room holding a knife covered in blood. Loftus then showed the participants 50 photos and asked them to identify the man who had come out of the room. She found that participants who had witnessed the peaceful discussion were more accurate in recognising the man than people who had witnessed the hostile discussion, thus suggesting that increased levels of anxiety cause a negative effect in the accuracy of information recall. Loftus concluded that the anxiety created by the weapon drew the focus of attention from the participants to the weapon and withdrew attention from the other features; i.e. the man’s face and characteristics. A supporting case to this is the study by Loftus and Burns (1982). In this experiment, participants were split into one of two conditions. They either: Watched a violent short film where a boy was shot in the head or watched a non-violent short film of a crime. Their findings were that participants were less accurate in recall when they saw the violent short film than those who watched the non-violent movie. This shows that the anxiety the participant experiences does have an effect on EWT. This demonstrates support for Loftus (1797) as it shows that when people witness anxiety provoking situations they are less likely to recall accurately. However Yuille and Cutshall (1986) ran a study which contradicted Loftus' finding. They showed that witnesses of a real life incident (a gun shooting outside a gun shop in Canada) had very accurate memories of a stressful event involving weapons. A thief stole guns and money, but before he could escape he was shot six times and died. The police interviewed several witnesses, and thirteen of them were re-interviewed five months later. The participants memory was found to be accurate, even after a long time, and even two misleading questions inserted by the researchers had no effect on the participants recall accuracy. The Yuille and Cutshall study shows two important points: There are a few cases of real-life recall where memory recall for an anxious / stressful event is accurate, even after a few months. And that misleading questions might not have the same effect as has been found in laboratory studies (for example Loftus & Palmer).

When I evaluate these different studies, I can see many different strengths and weaknesses. For example, one criticism is that the majority of research into anxiety and eyewitness testimony is laboratory based. This can be a strength or a weakness because if you are carrying out research in a laboratory then you have tight control over the variables and in doing so it makes the experiment easily replicable. But researching in laboratory conditions is a weakness because the experiment may lack mundane realism. The tasks are not usually common in real life, for example you would not be normally asked to recall a short film. This means that the participants may not be focused on the details as they would be in a real life crime. Another problem is that laboratory research is conducted in an artificial situation, this means that it may lack ecological validity which means the findings are not applicable outside of the laboratory setting. A final problem with laboratory environments is that the participants may realise the expectations of the research and may demonstrate demand characteristics. This will change the way they behave within the study and in doing so they will affect the validity of the research findings.
Another weakness is that the research into anxiety causes some ethical issues. For example the participants in Loftus' (1979) study were deceived as they were led to believe it was a real situation, this means it may have caused psychological harm to the participant. In addition; technically they did not provide fully informed consent and weren't told about their right to withdraw from the study. The researchers attempted to overcome this potential criticism by fully debriefing participants at the end of the study and allowing them the right to withdraw.
A final weakness is that the researchers used students as participants which means the sample was not a proper representative of the target population because they are used to exam style write-up accounts and are also generally less experienced drivers so they will be less confident in giving the speed estimates which again means you can't generalise them to the target population of drivers.