#workmyths — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #workmyths, aggregated by home.social.
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Eustress in humans is poorly studied, some make the case it doesn't exist: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201900238, while others https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8872528/ are attempting to measure it.
My takeaway - at worst it doesn't exist. If it does exist, then it isn't yet well enough defined to be useful.
(1) Yerkes, R.M., and Dodson, J.D. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit formation. _Journal of Comparative Neurology of Psychology, 18_(5), 459-482.
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I recently saw an article that invalidated Yerkes-Dodson Law: https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2024/2/29-1 in the context of education. And I thought, that's Eustress.
All sources I could find for Eustress point back to Yerkes-Dodson Law as the source for the idea (1). This is a paper from 1908. The age isn't in itself a problem.Instead:
1. The original only showed the inverted U shape response to stress in one of three experiments. -
Eustress is a popular idea in the world of work. The idea that some stress can be positive (improving performance) to a point and then past that point the stress hurts performance.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56acc1138a65e2a286012c54/223fd63d-1212-49f5-999c-6c0722255472/HebbianYerkesDodson.jfif?format=1500wI can just imagine some leaders I've met sizing individuals up and asking themselves (cue the cackle): "How much pressure can I apply to this person for better performance."
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