Eye witness testimonies are the evidence given in court or in police investigation by someone who has witnessed a crime or an accident. Eye witness testimonies are affected by a number of factors, but the one that I am going to focus on is anxiety. Laboratory studies and some ‘real life’ studies have generally shown impaired recall in people who have witnessed particularly distressing or anxiety induced situations. The weapon focus effect phenomenon as identified by Loftus 1979, she asked participants to sit outside a laboratory where they thought they were hearing a genuine exchange between people inside the laboratory. In the control condition, participants heard an amicable discussion about an equipment failure, a man then appeared from the room with greasy hands holding a pen. In the experimental condition, participants were subject to 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 supplied participants with 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 deviation in the accuracy of information recall. Loftus concluded that the anxiety elicited by the weapon narrowed the focus of attention for the participants and withdrew attention from the central features; i.e. the man’s face and physique. Deffenbacher et al 2004 found that culprits faces were identified 12% more of the time in low anxiety conditions than in high anxiety, in addition the number of details correctly recalled also increased in low anxiety conditions, thus supporting Loftus as she also found that lo anxiety increases accuracy of central features. However these studies, along with several other studies are laboratory experiments, resulting in high control and an artificial situation of a crime. This results in the studies lacking ecological validity as they are harder to generalise to the possible and results of witnessing a real crime which people have no preparation for.
The Term Paper on Sex Difference Women Men Studies
In this paper I will review four articles, one movie, and one experiment conducted in class. The issue's all this information covers is sex differences and the degree to which they exists in men and women and why they are present. There will be varying points of view for all these issues with each article having its own studies or theory 's to support its beliefs. The method for presenting this ...
However, Ihlebaek et al 2003 showed that eye witness testimony accuracy was distorted in both ‘live’ and ‘laboratory’ conditions and that deficient memories shown under laboratory experiments may not be due to the artificial situation, it may be due to other external factors, thus suggesting that findings of laboratory experiments can be generalised to the real world. A ‘real life’ study carried out in 2003 by Christianson and Hubinette carried out a survey among 100 people who had witnessed between them 22 genuine bank robberies. Some of the people had been bystanders, while some had been directly threatened by the robbers, the victims. They found that the people which had been subject to the greater level of anxiety (the victims) showed more detailed recall than the bystanders, therefore criticising Loftus 1975 as they found that a higher level of intermediate anxiety improves the accuracy of recall, whereas Loftus found that participants which were subject to low levels of anxiety had improved recall of recognising the man in the amicable discussion.
A ‘law’ first proposed by Yerkes and Dodson in 1908 called the ‘Yerkes-Dodson law’ suggested that intermediate levels of anxiety actually result in the peak of performance, thus suggesting that intermediate levels of anxiety induced by witnessing a criminal offence increase the accuracy of recall, thus supporting the findings of Christianson and Hubinette as they found that increased intermediate levels of anxiety increased the accuracy of recall compared to the control group., thus suggesting that a specific level of anxiety increases performance of recall. In addition, the law criticises the findings of Loftus as she found that low levels of anxiety increases the accuracy of recall, whereas in comparison to this law, low levels of anxiety actually result in low performance.
The Essay on Language Anxiety
Learning and teaching a language can be considered by many as a very challenging and demanding task due to what the process itself implies. Could you imagine how each language learner feels when he/ she is asked to perform an activity or just to speak in front of the class? Some of them will feel very comfortable but what about those whose hearts often pound really hard, break out in a cold sweat ...
Despite all these studies coming to a conclusion that anxiety has either a positive or negative effect on the accuracy of recall, a study carried out by Yuille and Cuitshall 1986, found that in a real life incident, despite the experience induced, their accuracy of recall was not significantly affected, thus criticising Loftus as she found that low levels of recall result in high levels of accuracy, suggesting that high levels of anxiety cause deficient recall, in criticism to Christianson and Hubinette, which they found that increased levels of anxiety increase the accuracy of recall, whereas Yuille and Cuitshall found that anxiety has no overall effect on the accuracy of recall. Finally, in addition to it being natural for eyewitness to attend to the weapon than the amount of attention paid to the central features, there is another possible reason for people attending to weapons due to it being unexpected in a given condition. Pickel 2009 found that weapon focus was stronger when the criminal carrying a folding knife was female rather than male, as it was more unexpected to see woman armed with a knife. Therefore this provided a different, yet supporting aspect of the phenomenon of weapon focus effect original proposed by Loftus in 1979.
