Even though, at that point, I had a feeling that pressure was the cause of Rodriguez’s failures, I still did not really know why such a thing would happen. How could somebody perform so well in unimportant game-situations and so poorly in the important ones? I was intrigued and was determined to find out. Yerkes and Dodson had found that there was a relationship between arousal and the performance of any task. When arousal was very low, people did not have any motivation to perform their task well, and, as a result, performed poorly. As arousal increased and became more moderate, performance steadily increased, but when arousal became too high, performance decreased again. Read More

• Social Science