Arousal and task performance

Explanation of the Yerkes-Dodson Law and factors influencing optimal arousal and task performance.

[dnbndu]

I am an introvert and my exam is tomorrow, so my arousal level increased.
after watching your channel I got confidence and my arousal level comes down to optimal.

[kozlorog]

Thank you a lot for clarifying the topic!

[theartofcompetition]

Good stuff. I would love to have you on the podcast sometime

[ajmarr]

Why the Yerkes-Dodson law is false

The Yerkes-Dodson law, in this video and indeed as represented throughout psychology, has nothing to do with the original work performed by Yerkes and Dodson, and is a falsehood. The problem though is that the Yerkes-Dodson law has little if anything to do with Yerkes or Dodson and may be rephrased to demonstrate correlations for many different psychological states. As the psychologist Karl Teigen put it: " In its original form as published in 1908, the law was intended to describe the relation between stimulus strength and habit-formation for tasks varying in discrimination difficultness. But later generations of investigations and textbook authors have rendered it variously as the effects of punishment, reward, motivation, drive, arousal, anxiety, tension or stress upon learning, performance, problem-solving, coping or memory; while the task variable has been commonly referred to as difficulty, complexity or novelty, when it is not omitted altogether. These changes are seldom explicitly discussed and are often misattributed to Yerkes and Dodson themselves. The various reformulations are seen as reflecting conceptual changes and current developments in the areas of learning, motivation and emotion, and it is argued that the plasticity of the law also reflects the vagueness of basic psychological concepts in these areas."
Basically, the Yerkes Dodson curve plots performance against physical arousal, which presumably represents real discrete events that can be plotted across the X and Y axes. Thus, given an X amount of performance, you can reliably infer a Y amount of arousal, and vice versa. This is all well and good if performance and arousal are consistently defined things. The problem is, for arousal at least, it's not. What is arousal? Indeed, there are many kinds: sexual, emotional, physical. Thus, a fellow can be aroused while peeping into the girls’ locker room, and aroused in a different way upon being discovered, and aroused more differently yet as he hightails it away.
Moreover, different states of arousal have different relationships to performance, and can occur separately or at the same time. Attentive alertness, as a form of arousal, increases performance as arousal increases. On the other hand, tension and attendant autonomic arousal, or anxiety, always decreases performance. Separate them both and the Yerkes-Dodson curve disappears but combine them and out it pops. For example, a person who is highly and pleasurably aroused while climbing a mountain or creating art doesn't suffer in performance as his arousal increases but gains in performance. On the other hand, a person who is frustrated while performing a task progressively loses his ability to perform well as anxiety increases. Nonetheless, as demand increases and decreases, these two very different types of arousal can occur simultaneously and produce a performance curve very similar to the Yerkes-Dodson model.
As an aroused state, attentive alertness scales with the novelty or surprise of moment to moment behavior. As a function of the release of the neurochemical dopamine, touch and go events that entail continuous positive surprises (e.g. rock climbing, gambling, creative behavior) positively correlate with aroused alertness, which not only feels good but helps you think better. Thus, the bigger the positive surprise, the more alert you become, and the better your performance becomes. If, however, surprises start to trend from good to bad, alertness decreases as we become progressively more depressed, but tension and associated autonomic arousal (i.e. anxiety) increases. That is, as news moves from good to bad, arousal doesn't increase, it just changes to an entirely new form! The problem though is that positive surprises always come at the risk that things will take a decided turn for the worse, as the rock climber get stuck in a snowstorm and the creative artist hits a writer’s block. Thus, the cost of higher good feelings is the chance you take that a turn of fortune will turn those good feelings bad. Generally, as demand increases risk increases, and at first we can handle it and be pleasantly surprised by and are motivated by the continuous moment to moment surprise of our success. But as demand ratchets up we are more likely to experience failure, and another type of arousal, that of anxiety. Hence as demand goes up, so do performance and arousal until performance reaches a crest and arousal begins to change not in amplitude but begins changing in kind. So, the Yerkes Dodson bell curve survives, it is rather the idea that arousal does not change in kind across the level of performance that falls away.
The lesson we learn from all this is that the highest motivation or performance stands at the cusp of failure, as we are rarely motivated by the sure and thus boring thing. Unfortunately, what psychologists take from the Yerkes-Dodson curve is the wrong lesson entirely, that arousal is a monolithic and indivisible thing that does not categorically change as demand increases. In other words, the lesson that no pain equals no gain is wrong. Rather, if you have pain you will likely have no gain. For folks that are a bit wary of the school of hard knocks, this is perhaps a lesson one can get a bit excited about.


Yerkes RM, Dodson JD (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology 18: 459–482.
Teigen, K. (1994) Yerkes-Dodson, A Law for All Seasons. Theory and Psychology 4, 525-547 More on the Yerkes-Dodson law and other

more on the Yerkes-Dodson law on p.67-73 of the my open source book ebook on rest, affect, and the unlikely laws that hold them up:

[billyramirezhealthybydesig]

the thumbs down is from people high in arousal

[Cheesecannon]

Life Pro Tip: hit minimum productivity by being bored *and* stressed at the _same time!_

[kirstinetermansen]

But If, rescue team did not master high arrousel we would be fucked

[alunenutz]

To sunmerize I watched 1 min 47 and feel too tires to watch the rest 😄😄