What is the relationship between arousal and behavior? Does this relationship impact performance and affect? At least 250 words What are the long-term and short-term effects of stress on the body, brain, and behavior? At least 250 words Answer are to remain private please.

Arousal is regarded as one of the important aspects in motivation. The more an individual is motivated the higher the arousal level. It is produced by internal and external stimuli and physiological and psychological needs. It can manifest itself through sweaty palms, tense muscles, rapid heartbeat, and accelerated breathing. Psychologically it can appear as anxiety, tension and fear. The energy produced by arousal is labeled as drive and this will produce a change, as we mentioned earlier, in the behaviors of an individual being it physically or psychologically. The relationship can be described as an inverted "u". curve. It has been observed that when the arousal level is highest, it will have a tendency to produce improved performance up to a certain point. After the optimum level is reached and arousal is highest we find that the amount of anxiety and distress grows and this in turn decreases performance. This effect is called the Yerkes Dodson effect. We may see this when students with high anxiety levels are taking a test and those students with lower anxiety levels tend to perform better then those with high anxiety. Since tests are usually complex tasks students who are overly anxious are more anxious than the required level of anxiety needed to perform well. Arousal does affect performance as it establishes a relationship where low arousal produces high performance on difficult tasks and high arousal produces high performance on easy tasks.

It is important to define stress as a multi faceted process that happens in response to events or situations in our environment. There are two types of stress: distress and eustress. When we find that an individual is in distress we will see that the arousal levels are either to high or too low producing negative emotions, maladaptive behavior, and diseases. However, eustress which is based on an arousal that is not too high nor too low, but just right will not create a sensation of overload, but give the impression that one can cope with the situation. There is short term results to stress like acute stress disorder (ASD)and a long term reaction to stress would be post traumatic stress disorder (PSD). There is a (GAS) general adaptation syndrome that is activated by our efforts to defend and adapt to stress. It involves three stages which are: alarm ( general mobilization)where stress hormones are released, resistance (effort to cope)where hormone levels go back to normal and exhaustion (fail to overcome threat)stress hormones rise into the blood stream and stress settles in. Many physical ailments can result form exposure to stress such as headaches, hypertension, muscle tension and lower the immune system. The effects of stress can affect our daily life and it very much depends on how we cope with life changes and demands. One way to help deal with stress is understanding how we view situations either negative or positive and what resources do we have at hand to help us cope in a healthy manner.

References:

Psychology Baron, Robert A (1998) Viacom Company, Needham Height, MA pg 506-524.