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If you consider eyewitness testimony as infallible, you must assume that eyewitness memory is accurate. However, this is not true according to numerous researchers who have investigated the effect of stress on the fidelity of eyewitness memory.
Eyewitnesses often have to describe violent events or crimes. Persons witnessing crimes or violent incidents will all experience some amount of stress. Stress affects the encoding of information and can negatively influence memory and recall. The stress response is a defensive response of the body that manifests as physiological changes, such as acceleration in the heart rate, higher blood pressure, and increased muscle tension. Studies show that stress can affect a person’s ability to identify individuals and to recall events and any level of details. In essence, the more stress a person experiences due to an incident, the less ability the person has to recall details accurately.
Studies also show that many individuals who face physical threats for more than thirty minutes are not able to identify the person who threatened them. A study conducted by Charles Morgan in 2004 proves this. Morgan’s study demonstrated the negative influence of stress on eyewitness recall. The subjects for the study were military personnel who were 25 years old on average. Interrogators questioned the subjects in stressful or non-stressful conditions for 40 minutes. Later, the subjects had to identify their interrogators. Subjects who underwent interrogation in stressful conditions could only identify the correct interrogator 34 percent of the time, whereas subjects who underwent interrogation in non-stressful conditions could identify the correct interrogator 76 percent of the time. In a different study, subjects interrogated under stressful conditions identified the wrong person 68 percent of the time, whereas subjects interrogated in non-stressful conditions only identified the interrogators incorrectly 12 percent of the time.
In contrast, some studies indicate that persons experiencing stress when the brain is encoding information may have a high emotional intensity and greater arousal. This can lead to better memory and recall. Various researchers attribute this to the fact that a high level of emotional stress can cause a person to focus more on central details, whereas memory for peripheral details will decrease.
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