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Effects Of Stress On Eyewitness

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Eyewitnesses that witness a crime, especially violent crime, commonly experience stress. Stress is a negative emotional state that causes both physiological changes and cognitive changes. High stress causes increased arousal, increase in heart rate, blood pressure and muscle tone. A person feels stress when encountering a threat and that causes high anxiety. High levels of stress can leads to holes in memory of eyewitnesses when asked to recall details such the persons involved. (Aharonian & Brian)

The Yerkes-Dodson law proposes that the relationship between arousal and performance is an inverted U, in which moderate increase in arousal causes performance to increase but with too much arousal, performance decreases (Diamond, Campbell, Halonen …show more content…

The difference between peripheral and central memory shows us why sometimes eyewitness have memory of details and sometimes they do not. Research and Meta analyses show that stress has more of a negative impact than a positive impact on eyewitness testimony, as they face difficulty in identifying a perpetrator from a lineup and recall certain details of the crime. In these studies, witnesses are typically asked to report information in two ways; interrogative and narrative. In narrative, witnesses are asked to say what they recall and have the ability to chose what information they want to report. The interrogative type of recall is when the police ask specific questions that the witness needs to respond to. High stress situations cause a greater decline in the accuracy of the interrogative e recall than the narrative recall. This might be because in the narrative recall, witnesses are free to report details and they may opt to remove information that they are not sure of. But, research into the effects of stress on eyewitness memory suffers from methodological complications, as there is a limit of the amount of stress we can put on a participant. Also, even with highly arousing materials, the participant do not feel personally threatened by the event and they feel as if they are bystanders, not the victim itself, and that influences their stress level, their behavior, degree of attention

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This means that individuals under stress may recall events less accurately, but still have high confidence in their recollections. This is evident with eyewitness Maillard as she was present during the shooting, which means it is plausible that she may have experienced trauma and even stress during the investigations as she had to live through the traumatic experience again, especially when telling officers her experience. This might have played a role in her judgement and accuracy of recalling what happened that night, but she was also quite confident that it

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Eyewitness accounts play a huge role in general in trials and verdicts, but may be unreliable many times, with certain views placed on evidence provided by children. Unreliability may arise from not being able to recount the identity of the accused, the actions and speech occurring during that time, the relationship of individuals towards the person in question, and many

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Research provided by the Innocence Project shows that Hundreds of people are accused of crimes they have never committed just because of eyewitness testimony and factors which distorted memory. Can we even trust our memory after knowing so many innocent people have been convicted? Coming back to the question: How does crime affect memory? Looking at the studies of Ronald Cotton and Bennett Barbour, they tell us that crime distorts the memory of a victim. In both cases, the victim identified the wrong person as their assailant.

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This week’s topic was very interesting to learn about how important eyewitnesses can be when a crime and accidents do occur. In the case that was presented in the 60-minute segment of Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson is exactly how legal system can fail us when it comes to the eyewitnesses’ identification testimony and how a person’s perception and memory can be altered. The aspect of psychology and law research from this week’s course material is most relevant to the topic of perception and memory. The memory has different stages the first is encoding the process of entering perception into memory.

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Her earliest studies of eyewitness testimony addressed several issues: when someone sees a crime or accident, how accurate is his or her memory? These studies led Loftus to ask what happens when witness are questioned by police officers, and what if those questions are suggestive (Loftus, 2003). For instance, when Loftus began showing people films of traffic accidents, she found that a question such as “How fast were the cars going when the smashed into each other?” led to higher estimates of speed than a more neutral question that used the verb “hit”. Moreover, the “smashed” question led more people to falsely remember seeing broken glass when there was none.

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Followed by the lack of corroboration, which is an important aspect in courtrooms, “corroboration will add credibility to the memory and lack of it may raise doubts about the allegations.” Loftus considers that relying on memory is not a valid way of justice; the legal system needs to improve when eyewitness testimonials are used in the courts. Loftus confides as a psychologist that psychological science has taught them about human memory and that the research has revealed the limits of human memory. Adding on, these research findings need to be incorporated in procedures to improve the court system. She hopes readers will acknowledge the fact that the use of memories in a trial can be problematic since they are “dangerous” and can lead to false

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Part One is very informational and contains the bulk of the book’s research. The information was presented in a thesis format; Loftus stated a claim and then supported her ideas with research and quotations from experts in the field of law and memory. Part One is helpful for psychologists, attorneys, and interested law people. The major principles concerning the errors in eyewitness testimony are supported by research and are accepted by psychologists (Kassin, Ellsworth, & Smith, 1989). Part One will contribute to the future of psychology by showcasing how the memory works and the different ways it is manipulated and changed: this will allow jurors and lawyers to become more wary when dealing with a traumatized

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