A psychological phenomenon where the performance of an individual at a particular task increases with physiological arousal, but only up to a point. After a while, the positive relationship between the two variables reaches a point of saturation, and excessive arousal, in fact, leads to a deterioration in task performance. The law is named after psychologists Robert Yerkes and Dillingham Dodson, who first proposed it in 1908. They observed that mild electric shocks on rats motivated them to complete tasks more efficiently, but as the shocks became too strong, their efficiency dropped dramatically.
