Understanding the Yerkes-Dodson law of arousal, affect, and workload when performing a motor sequencing task

The Yerkes-Dodson law was initially proposed by Yerkes and Dodson (1908) and predicts a quadratic relationship between arousal and performance, where moderate arousal facilitates performance while insufficient and excessive arousal diminish it. Although over a century of research in motor sequence learning has yielded mixed results, the theory is widely known among psychologists (Winton, 1987). This thesis evaluates the theory with more naturalistic observations by adopting the Dance Step-Sequence Production (DS-DSP) task, a dance motor sequence learning paradigm developed by Chan et al. (2025). We recruited 16 healthy individuals to perform the experiment and combined self-report data with reaction time data to determine the functional relationships that arousal, pleasure, and mental workload share with performance. The results of linear and quadratic regression analyses provided minimal evidence for the theory in the experiment. Only frustration, a subdimension of mental workload, was significantly related to reaction time in a quadratic function (p = 0.03), and only temporal demand significantly affected reaction time in a linear function (p = 0.03). These findings suggest that psychologists should approach theories and frameworks with caution and emphasize the need for more replication studies. We discuss potential explanations for these findings and provide directions for future work.