According to the Yerkes-Dodson law who should perform their task most successfully

According to the Yerkes-Dodson law who should perform their task most successfully

Show

  • According to the Yerkes-Dodson law who should perform their task most successfully
    Access through your institution

According to the Yerkes-Dodson law who should perform their task most successfully

According to the Yerkes-Dodson law who should perform their task most successfully

Abstract

According to the Yerkes-Dodson law, performance is an inverted-U function of arousal with a negative relationship between optimal arousal and task difficulty. Both easy (letter cancellation) and difficult (verbal abilities) tasks were completed during the morning by 100 subjects differing in impulsivity; each subject was tested with five different doses of caffeine. Data were subjected to a traditional analysis of variance; in addition, data from individual subjects were analyzed. Group-level results indicated that performance was an interactive function of task, caffeine, and impulsivity (P<0.05): As predicted by the Yerkes-Dodson law, performance on the easy task tended to improve as caffeine dosage increased, but on the difficult task, (less aroused) impulsive subjects improved while (more aroused) nonimpulsive subjects first improved and then deteriorated. Moreover, analyses of the performance of individual subjects strongly supported the inverted-U hypothesis (P<0.001). The hypothesis that easier tasks require higher levels of arousal for optimal performance than more difficult tasks received limited support at the individual level. Thus, despite methodological and probabilistic biases against the inverted-U and task-difficulty hypotheses, both group and individual level analyses yielded results consistent with the Yerkes-Dodson law.

References (74)

  • et al.

    Personality, time of day and visual perception: Preferences and selective attention

    Personality and Individual Differeces

    (1988)

  • G. Stenberg

    Personality and the EEG: Arousal and emotional arousability

    Personality and Individual Differences

    (1992)

  • J.G. O'Gorman et al.

    Extraversion, impulsiveness, and EEG alpha activity

    Personality and Individual Differences

    (1987)

  • A.C. Neubauer

    Psychometric comparison of two circadian rhythm questionnaires and their relationship with personality

    Personality and Individual Differences

    (1992)

  • G. Matthews

    Personality and multidimensional arousal: A study of two dimensions of extraversion

    Personality and Individual Differences

    (1987)

  • H.R. Lieberman

    Caffeine

  • B.S. Gupta

    Dextroamphetamine and measures of intelligence

    Intelligence

    (1977)

  • G. Frcka et al.

    Is there—or is there not—an influence of impulsiveness on classical eyelid conditioning?

    Personality and Individual Differences

    (1987)

  • M.W. Eysenck

    Anxiety, learning, and memory: A reconceptualization

    Journal of Research in Personality

    (1979)

  • H.J. Eysenck et al.

    Conditioning, introversion-extraversion and the strength of the nervous system

  • J.B. Campbell

    Extraversion and noise sensitivity: A replication of Dornic and Ekehammar's study

    Personality and Individual Differences

    (1992)

  • P.L. Broadhurst

    The interaction of task difficulty and motivation: The Yerkes-Dodson Law revived

    Acta Psychologica

    (1959)

  • P. Bowyer et al.

    Arousal and recognition memory: The effects of impulsivity, caffeine, and time on task

    Personality and Individual Differences

    (1983)

  • K.J. Anderson et al.

    The interactive effects of caffeine, impulsivity and task demands on a visual search task

    Personality and Individual Differences

    (1983)

  • K.J. Anderson

    Arousal and the inverted-U hypothesis: A critique of Neiss's “Reconceptualizing arousal”

    Psychological Bulletin

    (1990)

  • K.J. Anderson et al.

    Impulsivity, caffeine, and proofreading: A test of the Easterbrook hypothesis

    Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

    (1982)

  • Anderson, K.J. & Revelle, W. (in press). Impulsivity and time of day: Is rate of change in arousal a function of...
  • K.J. Anderson et al.

    Caffeine, impulsivity, and memory scanning: A comparison of two explanations for the Yerkes-Dodson effect

    Motivation and Emotion

    (1989)

  • P.J. Bickel et al.

    Sex bias in graduate admissions: Data from Berkeley

    Science

    (1975)

  • J.B. Biggs

    Coding and cognitive behaviour

    British Journal of Psychology

    (1969)

  • M.J.F. Blake

    Relationship between circadian rhythm of body temperature and introversion-extraversion

    Nature

    (1967)

  • D.E. Broadbent

    Decision and stress

    (1971)

  • P.L. Broadhurst

    Emotionality and the Yerkes-Dodson Law

    Journal of Experimental Psychology

    (1957)

  • N. Brody

    Human motivation: Commentary on goal-directed action

    (1983)

  • W.E. Broen et al.

    A reaction potential ceiling and response decrements in complex situations

    Psychological Review

    (1961)

  • G. Claridge

    Psychoticism and arousal

  • W.G. Cochran et al.

    Experimental designs

    (1957)

  • T.D. Cook et al.

    Quasi-experimentation: Design and analysis issues for field settings

    (1979)

  • D.W.J. Corcoran

    Introversion-extraversion, stress and arousal

  • L.J. Cronbach

    The two disciplines of scientific psychology

    American Psychologist

    (1957)

  • L.J. Cronbach et al.

    Construct validity in psychological tests

    Psychological Bulletin

    (1955)

  • J.L. Deffenbacher

    Relationship of worry and emotionality to performance on the Miller Analogies Tests

    Journal of Educational Psychology

    (1977)

  • S.J. Dickman et al.

    Impulsivity and speed-accuracy tradeoffs in information processing

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1988)

  • E. Duffy

    Activation and behavior

    (1962)

  • J.A. Easterbrook

    The effect of emotion on cue utilization and the organization of behavior

    Psychological Review

    (1959)

  • S. Epstein

    The stability of behavior: I. On predicting most of the people much of the time

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1979)

  • W.K. Estes

    The problem of inference from curves based on group data

    Psychological Bulletin

    (1956)

  • Cited by (78)

    • Bestial boredom: a biological perspective on animal boredom and suggestions for its scientific investigation

      2017, Animal Behaviour

      Boredom might provide the motivation to stay within optimal levels of arousal for learning or maximal task performance. The Yerkes–Dodson law predicts a U-shaped relationship between arousal and performance, which is often corroborated (e.g. Anderson, 1994), but see Wu et al. (2010) for example. Boredom can arise when tasks are too easy or too difficult, especially if learning is not achieved (e.g. Acee et al., 2010), so it encourages switching attention to more rewarding activities.

    Arrow Up and RightView all citing articles on Scopus

    • Research article

      Method study – record

      Work Organization and Methods Engineering for Productivity, 2020, pp. 97-119

    View full text

    Copyright © 1994 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

    What does the Yerkes

    The Yerkes-Dodson law is a model of the relationship between stress and task performance. It proposes that you reach your peak level of performance with an intermediate level of stress, or arousal. Too little or too much arousal results in poorer performance. This is also known as the inverted-U model of arousal.

    Which level of arousal gives the most effective performance?

    Research shows that moderate arousal is generally best; when arousal (stress) is very high or very low, performance tends to suffer.

    How does the Yerkes

    The Yerkes-Dodson Law states that for easy tasks, the higher the level of physiological or mental arousal, the higher the performance. But if the task at hand is difficult, a higher level or arousal will only increase performance until a certain point.

    Which of the following is true of the Yerkes

    According to the Yerkes-Dodson law, which of the following is true? We feel the horror of a bad injury only after we have seen the injury or seen how others react to it.