Practice question · Multiple choice
A coach gives the same rousing pre-match talk to a sprinter and to a chess player. Yerkes-Dodson predicts it helps one and harms the other. What has the coach failed to take into account?
Hints
- Both athletes are trying equally hard. So effort is not the variable.
- What is the chess player doing that arousal would interfere with?
Show the answer
C. That the optimal arousal depends on the task, not the effort.
Why
The coach is treating arousal as a general enhancer and the law says it is task-specific: narrowed attention is close to what a sprint wants and starts discarding candidate lines in chess. The identical intervention pushes one performer toward their peak and the other past it, and before a demanding multi-part task the useful move is usually to bring arousal down.
Practise Human Needs and Arousal Theories
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