Deffenbacher, K. A., Bornstein, B. H., Penrod. S. D, & McGorty, E. K. (2004). A meta-analytic review of the effects of high stress on eyewitness memory. Law and Human Behavior, 28, 687-706.
Deffenbacher et al. compiled an excellent Meta Analysis on how stress effects memory. In his article he stresses how important research on stress is because witnessing a crime almost always generates a stress response.
Deffenbacher and his researchers basically put together many articles by other researchers and on other experiments. They wanted to find a commonality between all of the articles to see whether there was a negative, positive, or neutral trend on stress effecting memory. Deffenbacher et al found that high levels of stress negatively impact both accuracy of eyewitness identification and accuracy of recall of crime related details. Although he did find this trend, it still does not answer the question on if stress is entirely a positive, negative, or neutral effect on memory. Over 30 years of data still has not brought a clear picture to what kind of effect happens and researchers are still currently studying these effects.
Overall, Deffenbacher et al article states that stress has a negative impact on eyewitness identification. Some of the limitations including individual differences in the witness are an interesting and beneficial way of answering some questions about the effects of stress. Testing a participant's trait anxiety, specific fears, physiological reactivity, personality, and level of neuroticism will help experiments results more accurate. Experimental manipulations like arousal mode of attention regulation or activation mode is also discussed as an idea of further research.
Summary by Kelli
The meta-analytic review is typically the way I like to dive into a new topic I may not be all too familiar with. With the stress-arousal topic, many issues are involved and thus differentiating the effects of one variable on some measure is sometimes difficult to study. Additionally, the many factors involved in physiological stress and arousal when a crime happens in actual environments seem so vast that any hopes of assessing how people actually respond physiologically and psychologically at the exact moment a true crime occurs seems grossly impossible. This, however, is not to say we should not conduct studies attempting to mirror these actual processes, but simply to note the argument from ecological validity concerning the discrepancy between the processes measured in the laboratory and the processes that occur, not in field studies, but the actual field, environment, or context in which so many seemingly unpredictable crimes are committed. Finely tuning the resolution of whatever apparatus and methods we ultimately decide are best to study the processes is always necessary and worthy of occupying a certain proportion of a person’s time. It is hard to say exactly, but perhaps the physiological measures are best for getting at fear, stress, and arousal elicited by various stimuli. Among the various responses elicited by certain stimuli, the comparison of which exact responses are contributing to what memory-based impairments is of the utmost importance. My meaning by this is essentially that if an event elicits areas in the brain associated with fear, then we may know something about how fear affects memory-related processes. However, if another emotion or response is elicited by some stimulus event , then we know how emotion or response x affects memory processes. By differentiating between the two we can tell what does and does not have an effect on memory, including the robustness or prevalence of certain physiologically-derived and potentially memory distorting phenomena.
djp
The meta-analytic review is typically the way I like to dive into a new topic I may not be all too familiar with. With the stress-arousal topic, many issues are involved and thus differentiating the effects of one variable on some measure is sometimes difficult to study. Additionally, the many factors involved in physiological stress and arousal when a crime happens in actual environments seem so vast that any hopes of assessing how people actually respond physiologically and psychologically at the exact moment a true crime occurs seems grossly impossible. This, however, is not to say we should not conduct studies attempting to mirror these actual processes, but simply to note the argument from ecological validity concerning the discrepancy between the processes measured in the laboratory and the processes that occur, not in field studies, but the actual field, environment, or context in which so many seemingly unpredictable crimes are committed. Finely tuning the resolution of whatever apparatus and methods we ultimately decide are best to study the processes is always necessary and worthy of occupying a certain proportion of a person’s time. It is hard to say exactly, but perhaps the physiological measures are best for getting at fear, stress, and arousal elicited by various stimuli. Among the various responses elicited by certain stimuli, the comparison of which exact responses are contributing to what memory-based impairments is of the utmost importance. My meaning by this is essentially that if an event elicits areas in the brain associated with fear, then we may know something about how fear affects memory-related processes. However, if another emotion or response is elicited by some stimulus event , then we know how emotion or response x affects memory processes. By differentiating between the two we can tell what does and does not have an effect on memory, including the robustness or prevalence of certain physiologically-derived and potentially memory distorting phenomena.
djp
The meta-analytic review is typically the way I like to dive into a new topic I may not be all too familiar with. With the stress-arousal topic, many issues are involved and thus differentiating the effects of one variable on some measure is sometimes difficult to study. Additionally, the many factors involved in physiological stress and arousal when a crime happens in actual environments seem so vast that any hopes of assessing how people actually respond physiologically and psychologically at the exact moment a true crime occurs seems grossly impossible. This, however, is not to say we should not conduct studies attempting to mirror these actual processes, but simply to note the argument from ecological validity concerning the discrepancy between the processes measured in the laboratory and the processes that occur, not in field studies, but the actual field, environment, or context in which so many seemingly unpredictable crimes are committed. Finely tuning the resolution of whatever apparatus and methods we ultimately decide are best to study the processes is always necessary and worthy of occupying a certain proportion of a person’s time. It is hard to say exactly, but perhaps the physiological measures are best for getting at fear, stress, and arousal elicited by various stimuli. Among the various responses elicited by certain stimuli, the comparison of which exact responses are contributing to what memory-based impairments is of the utmost importance. My meaning by this is essentially that if an event elicits areas in the brain associated with fear, then we may know something about how fear affects memory-related processes. However, if another emotion or response is elicited by some stimulus event , then we know how emotion or response x affects memory processes. By differentiating between the two we can tell what does and does not have an effect on memory, including the robustness or prevalence of certain physiologically-derived and potentially memory distorting phenomena.
djp
The meta-analytic review is typically the way I like to dive into a new topic I may not be all too familiar with. With the stress-arousal topic, many issues are involved and thus differentiating the effects of one variable on some measure is sometimes difficult to study. Additionally, the many factors involved in physiological stress and arousal when a crime happens in actual environments seem so vast that any hopes of assessing how people actually respond physiologically and psychologically at the exact moment a true crime occurs seems grossly impossible. This, however, is not to say we should not conduct studies attempting to mirror these actual processes, but simply to note the argument from ecological validity concerning the discrepancy between the processes measured in the laboratory and the processes that occur, not in field studies, but the actual field, environment, or context in which so many seemingly unpredictable crimes are committed. Finely tuning the resolution of whatever apparatus and methods we ultimately decide are best to study the processes is always necessary and worthy of occupying a certain proportion of a person’s time. It is hard to say exactly, but perhaps the physiological measures are best for getting at fear, stress, and arousal elicited by various stimuli. Among the various responses elicited by certain stimuli, the comparison of which exact responses are contributing to what memory-based impairments is of the utmost importance. My meaning by this is essentially that if an event elicits areas in the brain associated with fear, then we may know something about how fear affects memory-related processes. However, if another emotion or response is elicited by some stimulus event , then we know how emotion or response x affects memory processes. By differentiating between the two we can tell what does and does not have an effect on memory, including the robustness or prevalence of certain physiologically-derived and potentially memory distorting phenomena.
I also like to jump into a research area with a meta-analysis. It gives you an excellent review of the literature and may also provide information on moderating variables. I thought this meta-analysis was especially good at describing issues involving stress and arousal.