                          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.     
        
