Anxiety in Eyewitness Testimony

The role of concern in eyewitness testimony A research laboratory experiment by Loftus (1979)| Aim| To find aside if fear during a witness incident affects the accuracy of ulterior identification.| outgrowth| Participants were exposed to one of two situations:1. They overheard a quiet intervention in a laboratory some an equipment failure. A individual then emerged from the laboratory retentiveness a pen and with dirty word on his hands.2. They overheard a heated and antipathetic exchange between people in the laboratory. After the hearty of breaking render and crashing chairs, a earthly concern emerged from the laboratory holding a root word knife cover in blood.Participants were then given 50 photos and asked to identify the person who had come out of the laboratory.| Findings| 1. Those who had witnessed the man holding the pen accurately identified the person 49% of the time.2. Those who had witnessed the man with the bloody piece of music knife we successful only 33% of the time.| Conclusion| This finding has come to be known as the tool way phenomenon, where the witness concentrates on the weapon (in this exercise the bloodstained motif knife) and this distracts tending from the appearance of the perpetrator.

Loftus concluded that the venerate or anxiety induced by the sight of the weapon narrows the focus of attention and gives rise to very accurate revoke of the central details of the scene, but less accurate call of peripheral details.| military rating| Later research by Loftus and destroy (1982) has provided support for this finding. Partici pants watched either a violent or non-viole! nt briefly film of a crime. Those who saw the violent version, in which a boy was snap bean in the face, were less accurate in recalling information about the crime.However, it is mainly laboratory studies that produce this result. They could be accused of abstracted validity, as a rather dissimilar picture emerges if we ensure at field studies of real-life events.The experiment raises good issues about the welfare of...If you want to get a full-of-the-moon essay, order it on our website: BestEssayCheap.com

If you want to get a full essay, visit our page: cheap essay