Outline and Evaluate Research Essay

Many eye avowes are called to testify because they have figureed a crime, fortuity or incident. The anxiety if this may cause an affect on the reliableness of their EWT. There are two main issues in this question first the prediction of the Yerkes Dodson Law that as arousal increases, then so does exertion weather spotting, stage perfor military piece of musicce, or memory encoding, up to an individualist optimal level. However, after this optimum level it is suggested that the performance of the individual will decline, this could be triggered by terror. This theory was supported by Deffenbacher et als research. The assist issue is the machines decoct tack In Easterbrooks research he predicted that attention will narrow to the source of the threat e.g the knife the man is holding in that respectfore peripheral detail is lost e.g the details of the perpertrators face. This was supported by Loftuss laboratory studies in an artificial environs using film and slides, using independent groups design, where a obligate conditions showed the participants a similar shaft without weapons.In the first group they had a scene which they believed to be a real life violent crime involving a weapon, results showed that the participants remembered the knife in great detail but no other(a) features, such as the perpetrators face clothing and so forth However the participants in the control conditions witnessed the same person but wholly in a peaceful situation and the participants were able to recognise the man when given 50 photos. When we examine real life eye witness testimony recall however, there is excellent recall of detail, and the weapons- focal point effect was non supported. Yullie and Cutshall (1986) conducted a natural sample on 13 out of 21 bystanders who had witnessed a violent shooting 4-5 months previously. There recall was detailed and right and they were resistant to leading questions months after the event.Therefore, this suggest that bys tanders had reached the optimum level ( Yerkes Dodson Law) when they they witnessed the conclusion of the robber who had previously wounded the owner in Vancouver gun surf before the owner killed him. Weapon focus did not influence witness recall. Therefore we need to examine witnesses to the violent crime who faced a weapon rather than a bystander to confirm the effect of weapon focus shown by Loftus. The natural experiment conducted by Christanson and Hubinette (1993) in Sweden re-interviewed 58 witnesses (customers and shore tellers) to bank robberies that occurred around Stockholm in one year. Those witnesses who faced the weapon (bank tellers) they had better recall and accuracy of the event after a plosive speech sound of time rather than the bystanders. Optimum arousal is suggested but weapon focus is challenged.The ecological validity of this evidence is high although the participants cannot be haphazard delegate to the experiment and there is no control condition a s there would be in a laboratory experiment. However, Laboratory experiments lack the consuming arousal of a real crime so the supposed weapons effect may be the effect of distinct and unexpected events distracting participants to the unusual subdivision in the familiar. A strong point of Loftuss field experiment and supports the weapon focus effect is that it has ecological validity and comparison to the control condition provide strong support. A criticism is the inability of researchers fro randomly allocate participants in this study to experimental and control conditions to control individual differences.