Arousal

Define arousal

An energised state and level of activation and excitation, giving you readiness to perform.

What is the Reticular Activating System?

A cluster of brain cells that controls the direction and intensity of arousal.

What is Hull’s Drive Theory?

• As arousal increases, performance levels increase proportionately with a linear relationship.

• Performance is a function of drive and habit.

• We have a dominant response that is our already learned motor programme. More arousal and drive causes the dominant response and therefore improves performance.

What is Yerkes and Dodsons Inverted U Theory?

Performance improves as arousal increases until a threshold point where any further increase in arousal will worsen performance due to poor selective attention and missed cues. Under arousal causes low effort, over arousal causes motor skils and decision making to deteriorate.

What causes a shift in the Inverted U Theory?

Personality, task difficulty, stage of learning all change the optimum arousal point. An experienced performer may still be able to use their dominant response in high arousal situations.

Define somatic arousal and cognitive arousal

Somatic- The changing state of the body

Cognitive- Psychological arousal in reference to the mind

What are the criticisms of Drive Theory?

• Increased drive doesn’t always improve performance, performance cannot realistically continue improving.

• At high arousal, less information is processed as they focus on the dominant response, not the environment.

• A poorly learned skill at high arousal will cause mistakes.

• Complex tasks require lots of information to be processed and high arousal could cause cues to be missed.

• Simple tasks don’t require so much thinking so could be performed well at high arousal.

What is Catastrophe Theory?

Increased arousal improves performance to an optimal point but there is then a dramatic reduction in performance when arousal increases beyond optimal.