How Does Eyewitness Cause Cognitive Anxiety?

The concept of this article was about eyewitness accounts and how an individual is under stress they can most like mislead in their descriptions of crimes or misidentify suspects. In this research their main question was to see if a situation induces cognitive anxiety, high levels of physiological arousal can cause a marked impairment in eyewitness recall and identification. Deffenbacher had hypothesized that when high levels of cognitive anxiety and increasing levels of somatic anxiety will result in improvement of memory until there is a drop in memory performance. In order to start this test it was divided into two parts. First they asked twenty employees from a store to give their normal heart rates as a baseline for the research. This data was used as a baseline for the data. …show more content…
During the tour the volunteers were lead through creepy mazes and shown scenes to scare them during the tour an actor was placed in make up and told to stand in front of the volunteers. A self report was first given to the volunteers to measure their state anxiety. After the tour and all data was collected researchers found that sex and state anxiety has a correlation in which the female participants had a higher score of state anxiety then the male participants. The results also showed that those who score above the median were able to correctly identify the actor in a nine person line up while those who scored below the median were able to correctly identify the culprit. Furthermore the result also revealed that females are more likely to identify facial feature then