Yerkes-Dodson Law

The Yerkes-Dodson law is an empirical relationship between arousal and performance, originally developed by the psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson and published in 1908 in the Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology. It holds that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point, after which higher arousal causes performance to decline, a relationship often illustrated as a bell-shaped curve that rises and then falls as arousal increases. The original paper, a study of the Japanese house mouse referred to as the dancing mouse, was cited only about ten times over the following half century, yet four of those citing articles had already begun describing the finding as a psychological law.