Social Psychology Midterm

Since it is already past halfway through the semester (time flies!), I have already had midterms in a couple of my classes at Wake Technical Community College. However for one of these classes (Social Psychology) we were given a split midterm in which half of it was an essay portion that was to be taken in class and the other was a multiple choice portion that was to be completed over the weekend. Although they were two pieces to the same midterm, the process of completing each one contrasted drastically in comparison with one another. From my perspective, the essay portion of the test was very high pressure because it not only required me to define, identify, and apply different psychological concepts to a real life scenario, but it forced

This law has been dubbed the Yerkes-Dodson Law of Arousal, which was named after the two scientists that first hypothesized it, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson. This law states that the relation between arousal and performance is in the shape of an inverted parabola when arousal is on the horizontal axis and performance is on the vertical axis. In other words, there is almost a, 'goldilocks' type of balance between arousal and performance; too little or too much arousal can compromise performance, but if the amount of arousal is just right, performance will be optimized. There are also different curves depending upon the difficulty of the task the individual is performing: if the task is more difficult or complex, the curve will be more flat/gradual and if the task is simpler, the curve will be more arched. Basically, reaching the optimal level of performance for a complex task requires more arousal than attaining the same level of performance for a simple task. Interestingly enough, some of the best research that explains this theory was actually done by another Psychologist by the name of J. A. Easterbrook. One of the most famous theories that he made proposed that arousal narrows attention, which can help make sense of every part of the Yerkes-Dodson curve. On the portion of the curve that is rising towards the maximum, there is too little arousal and attention is too broad; therefore, other stimuli extraneous to the one the individual wants to focus on become distracting because they are absorbed through their broad filter of attention. At the maximum of the curve however, there is the optimal amount of arousal so that the individual can focus on the task at hand while simultaneously blocking out external stimuli that were originally distracting to them. Then after the maximum, in which the curve starts to descend again, the