Title: Stress and Eyewitness Memory - IResearchNet
Headings: Stress and Eyewitness Memory
Stress and Eyewitness Memory
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Content: The physiological experience of stress is associated with increased arousal, marked by increases in heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tone. The subjective experience typically includes some perception of threat and feelings of anxiety. People often assume that a high level of emotion, positive or negative, will facilitate memory; however, it is also possible that intense emotion, especially the high level of stress associated with witnessing a crime, would lead to decrements in memory for details of the crime itself and for the ability to recognize the persons involved. Early studies investigating the effects of stress on memory yielded inconsistent findings. Some researchers found that accuracy suffered when witnesses were under stress, others found that it was unaffected, and a minority of researchers reported improvements in accuracy. This ambiguity can be explained, in part, by variations in the degree of stress. The Yerkes-Dodson law proposes that the relationship between arousal and performance can be plotted as an inverted U, where with moderate increases in arousal, performance is improved but with too much arousal performance declines. This theory was subscribed to by many researchers, and initially, it was thought to provide an explanation for the seemingly contradictory pattern of research findings. The studies that found improvements may have elicited an optimal level of stress or arousal, whereas those studies that had found decrements had exceeded that optimal level of stress.