The "Yerkes-Dodson" Law and Stress, Anxiety and Performance in Nuclear Medicine

Introduction: -We discuss the Yerkes-Dodson Law which discusses how performance increases in the presence of stress and mental arousal. When stress levels become too high, then performance will decrease. This has application to the nuclear medicine and radiology workplace, especially during COVID-19.-Discuss the concepts of Yerkes-Dodson Law and how it can be applied to healthcare and the fields of nuclear medicine and radiology.

Methods: In 1908, Yerkes and Dodson generated their law which expressed by inverted-U-shaped function and represented the variance in forming a habit depending on the strength of the used stimuli. We evaluated the law with stress and anxiety and performance in Radiology.

Results: According to Yerkes and Dodson law, very high or very low intense stimuli leads to a drop in performance. Applying this in nuclear medicine and radiology shows that stress and anxiety to a specific point that is healthy for alertness, arousal and focus can lead to a better performance. However, when stress is over this level, this can lead to a notable deterioration in the level of performance. Too much or too little stress or anxiety would not introduce the best positive correlation with performance.

Conclusions: Keeping a healthy limit of stress could affect both arousal and performance positively in practicing nuclear medicine and radiology but going far beyond that could be devastating on performance and increase the rates of burnout. This is especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic where healthcare is under increased stress, anxiety and with more workers leaving the workplace due to burnout. More studies assessing Yerkes and Dodson law and optimizing the cutoffs for healthy stress for arousal and performance are needed.