Does stress during a theft make eyewitnesses worse at identifying the thief a week later?

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Eyewitness identification research generally considers stress and arousal at the time a memory is encoded to impair later identification. In contrast, neurobiology research on learning and memory indicates that stress and stress hormones are critically involved in forming enduring memories.

The abstract suggests that this discrepancy may reflect methodological differences. Eyewitness studies tend to test memory immediately or after very short retention intervals of 1–2 hours, whereas neurobiology studies allow at least 24 hours. Another difference concerns how effectively laboratory conditions stimulate stress-responsive systems, specifically the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

The researchers aimed to conduct an experiment that incorporated contemporary knowledge from both fields. A total of 123 participants witnessed a live staged theft while either being exposed to a laboratory stressor that reliably elicits autonomic and glucocorticoid stress responses or performing a control task. Salivary cortisol levels were measured to check the effectiveness of stress induction.

One week later, participants attempted to identify the thief in target-present and target-absent line-ups—that is, line-ups with and without the thief. Regression and receiver operating characteristic analyses indicated that stress did not have robust detrimental effects on identification performance.

Publication notice supplied with the abstract: Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. © 2016 The Authors. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.