THE ACCURACY-CONFIDENCE RELATIONSHIP IN AN EYEWITNESS TASK - ANXIETY AS A MODIFIER

The present study investigated the role of anxiety as a moderator of t he relationship between accuracy and confidence in an eyewitness recal l task. Participants selected as high or low anxious on a test anxiety scale viewed a video clip of a crime. One week later they answered ve rbally a series of questions about the video, rating their confidence in each answer. Observers were shown a video-recording of each partici pant's test session and rated how confident they appeared overall. It was argued that people high in test anxiety would appraise their perfo rmance to a greater degree than low-anxious people, resulting in a sig nificant correlation between accuracy and subjective confidence for hi gh-anxious but not for low-anxious participants. The results obtained supported this hypothesis, and found similar relationships between acc uracy and perceived confidence. Highly anxious participants expressed less overall confidence in their answers than low anxious participants . (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.