COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Answer 5) Emotional Stress and Eyewitness Testimony

Stress exerts significant impact on the eyewitness memory. Overall, stress builds a negative impact on eyewitness, but its degree will primarily depend on the nature of the stress witnessed, the relation to a person's recognition, recall of the event itself. In the field of criminology, we see that stress have been of particular relevance for the eyewitnesses so much so that they developed mental disorders such as PTSD. Although there might be some immediate physiological changes experienced by the eyewitness - such as increased heart rate and muscle tone, stress might later result in anxiety, feelings of threat and even death.

Stress is closely related as a negative emotion, leading to decrements in memory. Studies show that stress might or might not yield to memory loss. However, the Yerkes-Dodson law sees the relationship between arousal and performance as inverted or 'U shaped' indicating arousal-performance-decline trend. Other research on the subject indicated that the optimal stress levels, or arousal, led to decrements in stress later (Conway, 2004, 847).

Another explanation for the relationship between high stress and emotion is shown through the narrowing of attention and focus of the eyewitnesses. Memory was found to be better for central details and poorer for the peripheral details of the stressful event. In all related studies, eyewitnesses' responses have generally been classified into interrogative and narratives.

High stress events were noted to prove less detailed and accurate for interrogative responses than narrative responses, possibly because narrative recalls could easily be manipulated by the respondents. Studies investigating stress effects on children show that the same incidents proved even more stressful. Stressful events like real crime and medical surgeries were amongst the most investigated in these research studies (Berkman, 2000, 137).

Answer 6) Social Cues in Language Development

The social identity tradition is the basis of in-group favouritism and inter-group comparisons. Simply put, social group identifications and variables like age, gender, social class, religion and ethnicity) have strong influence on the inter-group communications and the communication behaviours. There is growing empirical evidence that in-group favouritism and social stereotyping essentially impact on the language variations. According to the linguistic intergroup bias model developed by Maas, Salvi, Arcuri, and Semin, the abstractness levels of language are directly related with the in-group and out-group behavior based on language choices. The model proposes that individuals prefer abstract language when describing negative actions of out-group ...