being an eyewitness to a crime is not a comfy nice relaxing experience your body responds with a heightened state of alertness as your fight or flight response kicks in and you feel the adrenaline pumping through your body and then it's over and then you're asked to recall what happened will the accuracy of your memory as an eyewitness be better because you were so stressed and anxious or will this have negatively impacted your ability to recall hey everyone welcome back to parity mind in this video we're exploring factors that affect the accuracy of eyewitness testimony an eyewitness is someone who has seen something happen often in relation to a crime and can give a first-hand description of it previously we've seen how the accuracy of eyewitness testimony can be affected by misleading information whether that's leading questions or post-event discussion in this video we're going to explore another Factor thought to affect eyewitnesses anxiety [Music] some research appears to point to how anxiety can have a negative effect on recall logically this makes sense when we think about what happens to us both psychologically and physiologically during stressful situations the fight-or-flight response kicks in our heart rate goes up adrenaline is pumping through our bodies and our attention Narrows this brings us to weapons Focus imagine working behind the counter of a shop when someone walks in and points a gun in your face no prizes for guessing what your attention is going to be consumed with weapons Focus refers to the concentration of a witness's attention on a weapon which results in reducing their ability to remember all the details of the crime in a study conducted by Johnson and Scott in 1976 participants in this study were told to have a seat in a waiting room outside a laboratory whilst they waited for the study to start however unbeknown to them the study had already started there were two conditions in this condition one in this condition they overheard a discussion taking place in the laboratory about some equipment not working a man then left the laboratory carrying a pen with grease on his hands condition two they overheard a heated argument in the laboratory followed by the sound of glass breaking and crashing chairs a man then left the laboratory carrying a knife covered in blood the participants were asked later to identify the man from a set of 50 photographs they found that 49 could recall the man from condition 1 the low anxiety condition but only 33 percent could recall the bathroom condition 2 the high anxiety condition it was suggested that the reason why recall was poor in condition 2 was because the participants attention had been focused on the weapon the knife when in a heightened state of arousal particularly when we sense threatened danger our attention can narrow down and focus on the central details in this case the weapon and miss some of the peripheral details like the appearance and clothing of the man holding the knife therefore this study demonstrates the negative effect anxiety can have an eyewitness testimony now a quick side note here you may have felt that the way this study was designed was a little bit unethical I mean how would you have felt to be in the waiting room for a study only for a man to walk out with a knife and blood on his hands to then discover later it was all fake This research could certainly be criticized on ethical grounds for causing psychological harm to the participants as well as deceiving them about the real purpose of the study which additionally means there was a lack of informed consent from the participants which furthermore means participants lack the ability to withdraw from the study because they didn't even know that that was the study [Music] however on the flip side all the research points to anxiety having a different effect on eyewitness testimony some research points to how anxiety can have a positive impact on memory the idea behind this is that the fight or flight response improves our memory through increasing our alertness because we become much more aware of what is going on and those memories are stronger because of how arousing and stressful they were research by John Ewell and Judith cutshall in 1986 investigated people who had been eyewitnesses to a real-life traumatic crime in Vancouver Canada a man into the gun shop tied up the owner and robbed the place stealing money and guns the thief then fled the shop and the owner managed to free himself and then run out of the shop to catch the number plane of the thieves cars he drove away however the thief hadn't gotten in his car yet and when he saw the owner the three suddenly shuffled twice from close range when the owner himself also carrying a gun returned by all the bullets in his revolver shooting the thief six times amazingly the illness survived following surgery but the thief was killed there were 21 Witnesses who saw the crime who were all interviewed by the police immediately afterwards four to five months later Yul and cutshall contacted the 21 Witnesses about interviewing them again for their study and 13 of them agreed when they compared the witnesses memory recall across the two interviews they found high levels of accuracy in their description of the event importantly the witnesses who had been most distressed at the time of the shooting gave the most accurate account five months later their accuracy was 93 in comparison to 75 accuracy for the other Witnesses this study makes an important contribution to our understanding of eyewitness testimony previous laboratory research into eyewitness testimony had found that anxiety had a negative effect on recall but this study conducted in a more realistic and therefore more equal logically valid setting found the opposite effect anxiety can have a positive effect on eyewitness testimony for another example consider research by Christensen and hubenet in 1993. in their research titled hands up a study of witnesses emotional reactions and memories associated with bank robberies they considered 22 real bank robberies and they found no evidence of high arousal having a negative impact on recall Witnesses could still remember accurately the details they originally provided anywhere from 4 to 15 months later suggesting that highly emotional real life events are well remembered over time anxiety can have a positive effect on eyewitness testimony [Music] now finally our psychology students can you use your psychological knowledge to critically consider the studies we've explored well on the one hand one of the main strengths of research by Yul and kuchol and Christensen and hubenet is that they were real life studies often psychological research can have the problem of studying behavior in artificial settings which means that the results from such research may not generalize to real life behaviors the participants in these two studies were not sat comfortably watching a film of a crime they were really there they really experienced the anxiety and stress of being an eyewitness and so give us a more realistic and ecologically valid set of results about eyewitness testimony however on the other hand with the benefit of higher ecological validity often comes a lack of control of extraneous variables for example for both Yule and kuchol and Christensen and hubenet participants could have been influenced by post-event discussion they could have talked about what happened which strengthened their memories and no doubt there would have been news reports in the days and weeks after the crime which could have also helped consolidate their memory interestingly in Newland cutshall study those eyewitnesses who experienced the highest levels of stress were also closer to the crime itself and so proximity to the crime might be an extraneous variable because the closer you are the more you can see this lack of control of the variables makes it harder therefore to establish cause and effect to definitively conclude that high levels of anxiety cause better recall so now we know how the accuracy of eyewitness testimony can be influenced and affected by anxiety but how can we improve the accuracy of eyewitness testimony this brings us to the all-important cognitive interview used by the police and once you understand how it works you won't be able to watch a police interview on TV the same way again to learn about the cognitive interview you can click the video on the screen now I hope you found this video helpful and we'll see you in the next one