Anxiety in Eyewitness Testimony

The role of concern in eyewitness testimony A science laboratory experiment by Loftus (1979)| Aim| To find turn out if fretting during a witness incident affects the accuracy of later on identification.| outgrowth| Participants were exposed to one of two situations:1. They overheard a quiet intervention in a laboratory active an equipment failure. A somebody then emerged from the laboratory retentiveness a compile and with dirty word on his hands.2. They overheard a heated and distant exchange between people in the laboratory. After the well-informed 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 report card knife we successful only 33% of the time.| Conclusion| This finding has come to be known as the tool centre phenomenon, where the witness concentrates on the weapon (in this exercise the bloodstained penning knife) and this distracts aid 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 detail 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 . Participants watched any a violent or non! -violent briefly film of a crime. Those who saw the violent version, in which a boy was gunman 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 lacking(p) validity, as a rather dissimilar picture emerges if we facial expression at field studies of real-life events.The experiment raises good issues about the benefit of...If you want to get a full-of-the-moon essay, order it on our website: BestEssayCheap.com

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