Outline and Evaluate Research Into the Effects of Anxiety on the Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony. (12 Marks)

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Eyewitness Testimony refers to witnesses who are asked to give testimonies in court to particular crimes, disputes etc. Eyewitness Testimony consists of : the eyewitness encoding to LTM describing the order of the events and the people involved. It also consists of the witness retaining information for a period of time and finally it consists of the witness retrieving memory from the storage. Eyewtiness 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. Deffenbacher et al did a meta analysis from 21 studies they looked at 18 studies and found that higher anxiety has a negative impact on recall for the eyewitness. A meta analysis is good because it ensures that all the faults in the experiments cancel each other out and the fact that it was from different studies suggests there is a high validity. However by saying this, what type the experiments were are not known. For example if they were predominantly lab experiments then this will lack ecological validity and factors like demand characteristics, experimenter bias and the halo effect may have come into effect. Further support comes from Kohler et al (2002) who gave particpants 50 words and measured the galvine skin resistance (GSR) for the levels of stress. He found that words with a high level of GSR were the words that were most anxious and worst remembered. However there may be some ethical issues as participants may have thought that there may be harm in the GSR but the fact that there was no complaints suggests that is was ethical. The tests carried out were objective which is a much more reliable and valid way of measuring that subjective techniques like self-report measures which may have demand characteristics. On the

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