Anxiety and Memory
Conflicting Research
Many researchers have looked at the relationship between anxiety and accuracy in eyewitness testimony. The results from a series of studies (Deff enbacher et al. 2004) between the years of 1974 and 1997 have shown consistent level of accuracy depending upon the lever of anxiety.
Its clear that there is considerable support that high levels of stress have a negatively impact on the accuracy of eyewitness memory.
However some other studies have found that emotional arousal may actually enhance the accuracy of memory. Witnesses of bank robberies, questioned by Christianson Hubinette(1993), who had been threatened in some way were more accurate with their recall then those who had been just onlookers, less emotionally aroused.
Why May the Research Conflict?
This apparent contradication could be explained with a reference to
Yerkes-Dodson law, which states that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases.
Most researches believe that a small to medium increase in arousal will actually result in accurate memory recall where as to high arousal level will interfere with accuracy.
Those studies that showed great memory recall were more then likely dealing with the first part of the Yerkes-Dodson curve, whereas the other studies that showed a decline in memory accuracy were more then likely operating in the second part of the curve.
KEY TERM
Anxiety is an unpleasant emotional state where we fear that something bad is about to happen. People often become anxious when they are in stressful situations, and this anxiety tends to be accompanied by physiological arousal (e.g. a pounding heart and rapid, shallow breathing). Because of this, much ofthe research in this area is focused on the effects of arousal on EWT.
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