Award Date

8-1-2020

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

First Committee Member

David Copeland

Second Committee Member

Colleen Parks

Third Committee Member

Mark Ashcraft

Fourth Committee Member

Sara Gordon

Number of Pages

101

Abstract

The impact of stress on eyewitness recall and identification accuracy has been studied extensively but with somewhat inconsistent results. Understanding the effects of stress are important if they are to be generalized to victims or witnesses of real crimes. This study consisted of two experiments that used an extreme haunt and a haunted house to examine attendees’ ability to recall details of and identify actors encountered, as a function of state anxiety and in the context of Deffenbacher’s (1994) catastrophe model of memory performance under anxiety. The results showed that physiological (i.e., heart rate) and psychological (i.e., State Anxiety Inventory) measures of arousal were associated for extreme haunt attendees but not haunted house attendees. In contrast to previous research conducted by Valentine and Mesout (2009), the current research suggests that reported levels of stress can sometimes have minimal or no effect on eyewitness recall or identification accuracy.

Keywords

Catastrophe model; Confidence; Eyewitness memory; Lineup identification; Sensation seeking; Stress

Disciplines

Cognitive Psychology | Criminology | Criminology and Criminal Justice | Social Psychology

File Format

pdf

File Size

1400 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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