3. ACTIVATION AROUSAL THEORY As a result of the problems developed in the Hullian approach to the study of the motivational process, researchers faced the task of developing new ways of dealing with the psychology of human motivation. This search led to the development of the Activation Arousal Theory (AAT). The overall framework of AAT is summarized in the following statements: 1. Physical stimulation that affects an organism contributes to its physiological and psychological arousal level. 2. The impact of stimulus in terms of its contribution to the arousal level of the organism is a positive function of such variables as its intensity, its meaningfulness, its complexity, the recency of its previous occurrence, the frequency of such occurrences, and the extent to which it provides variation from previous stimulation (Fiske and Maddi, 1961; Walker, 1964). 3. For a given organism at a given time of day, there is a level of arousal that is normal and appropriate for it, and behavior is motivated toward achieving that normal arousal state for that given time of day; having attained that state of normal arousal, its behavior is also motivated toward maintaining that state, in that the organism will engage in behavior designed to increase its arousal level when it is too low and decrease it when it is too high. 4. Having attained such a state of normal arousal, the organism becomes more sensitive to other aspects of the environment and is more able to deal with them in an efficient manner. If his behavior does not have to be directed toward the achievement of optimal arousal, it can then be directed toward whatever external demands happen to be operating in the environment at the given time. Such increased attention to external environmental demands when an organism is at an optimal activation or arousal level should then lead, all other things being equal, to a U-shaped relationship between arousal level and task performance, since it is when he is in his optimal arousal state that he can pay most attention to task demands (Dember and Earl, 1957; Berlyne, 1960; McClelland, 1955). AAT postulates that both the arousal and direction of behavior is due to the desire to achieve some kind of "balanced" outcome. It rejects too much stimulation and too little. The current arousal state of the organism determines both the arousal and directive influence on behavior. The degree of arousal and its direction is a function of the degree of deviation from the optimal level. One advantage of this approach is that it does not equate the "desirable" end state of behavior with need or stimulus reduction, a position found seriously deficient in some theories (Eisenberger, 1972). The argument proposes that behavior is oriented toward the achievement of a balanced state of activation. Data supporting the hypothesis were found by Grossman, (1967), and Korman, (1971a). One of the most significant aspects of AAT is that it conceptually overcomes the weaknesses of the Hull/Freud approach in predicting that behavior ceases once the reduction of the stimulus is achieved. If the organism is in a task situation that is making specific demands for a specific set of behaviors, the prediction of the AAT is that there will be a U-shaped relationship between arousal and performance. The arousal and directedness of behavior is seen as stemming from the task demands of the situation, as well as whatever other specific motivational variables happen to be operating at the time. What is important is that one source of behavior variance is not influencing performance in the optimal arousal situation. Behavior is more controlled by the demands of the external environment and is more effective if it is a setting calling for task performance. Some interesting research supported the hypothesis by which physical stimuli influence states and related behavior in human beings. Zlutnick and Altman (1972) found that crowding affected the ability of the organism to control interaction with others or increase the costs of doing so in a physiological and or psychological sense. Glass and Singer (1972) discovered that the psychological variable of unpredictability, and the anxiety felt because of the lack of control, and it is more important than the physical parameter known as noise intensity in predicting adaptation to noise in task situations. The effect is the same over (a) different procedures for manipulating unpredictability; (b) different levels of physical noise; (c) both male and female subjects; (d) different laboratories. In a second study, Glass and Singer (1972) found that the concept explained some of the effects of physical stimulation on behavior. They wrote that people who are being exposed to stressful physical stimuli will find it even more intolerable if they are made conscious of the fact that others comparable to themselves are being exposed to stimuli less stressful. Finkelman and Glass (1970) studied the effect of noise on human performance in terms of its influence on the information- processing capacities of the individual and its tendency to utilize those processes in a manner that increases the capacity of the individual to respond adequately to other stress stimuli. They found that noise adversely affected human performance. Helson (1964) and Zlutnick and Altman (1972) hypothesized that the effect of any specific type of physical stimulation on an individual is a function of his experience with stimuli of that nature, his expectancy of that situation, and the amount of time he has been in that situation. One of the advantages of AAT is that theoretically, it may be studied by utilizing physiological and psychological measurements. In each case, the antecedents and the consequences are supported to be the same. Basically, the findings on the measurement of arousal states can be summarized as follows: 1. There are only moderate correlations between different measures of physiological arousal. This suggests that whatever each of these measures is something separate from the others. The implications are that while there may be a general-arousal state. There are also specific-arousal states (Lacey, 1950). 2. A simple self-report of arousal, either estimated in a general subjective sense (Dermer and Berscheid, 1972) or measured by an adjective checklist (Thayer, 1967) may correlate more highly with physiological measures than the physiological measures correlate with each other. Such simple self-report measures seem to be able to meet fairly demanding construct-validity criteria of the type discussed by Dermer and Berscheid (1972). AAT tried to account for (a) the fact that people sometimes try to increase as well as reduce stimulation, and (b) the observation that some people differ systematically as to what the desirable types of stimulation are, and (c) that the postulation of biological utility as a rationale for behavior is not assumed. Despite these advantages, AAT presented problems of its own. One of these problems was that the term, arousal, did not describe whether or not we were talking about physiological arousal or a psychological variable. While the two were sometimes related, they did not have to be, since it was comparatively easy to show that the same experimental variables that lead to different results as a function of psychological influences. Finally, the adoption of a curvilinear model posed significant problems for research testing of the approach.