Construct · 3 fields · 4 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, three constructs Nearest construct by meaningactivationcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to arousal is activation.
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The body's overall level of physiological energisation, its autonomic and cortical readiness to act, treated as a single continuum from deep rest to intense excitement. Duffy named this activation in 1957, arguing that behaviour varies along one dimension of intensity set by the organism's energy mobilisation, readable in heart rate, skin conductance, and muscle tension. The same whole-body variable is invoked to explain the inverted-U that Yerkes and Dodson reported in 1908, in which performance rises with stimulus strength up to an optimum and then falls. Arousal here is a property of the organism as a whole, read from peripheral and cortical indices, not a felt quality and not a brain region. It is the meaning in which a person is called 'highly aroused' when their body is mobilised for effort.[1][2]
One of the two axes of Russell's 1980 circumplex model of affect, running from sleepy or calm to activated or excited, and held to be independent of valence, the pleasant-to-unpleasant axis. Russell arranged felt states around a circle spanned by these two dimensions, so that tense, excited, serene, and bored differ in arousal as much as in valence. Arousal in this meaning is a property of subjective experience, read from a person's self-report of how activated they feel, and on its own it says nothing about whether the feeling is good or bad. It is a coordinate of reported feeling, not a bodily reading and not a level of wakefulness, and a person can report high arousal that no single autonomic channel confirms.[3]
The level of cortical alertness, from sleep to full waking, set by the ascending reticular activating system in the brainstem. Moruzzi and Magoun showed in 1949 that stimulating the brain stem reticular formation replaced the slow synchronised EEG of a drowsy animal with the fast low-voltage pattern of an alert one, and that damage to the system produced somnolence, identifying a specific neural pathway that raises and lowers cortical arousal. Arousal in this meaning is a physiological state of the forebrain driven from below, indexed by EEG desynchronisation and behavioural wakefulness. It is neither a reported feeling nor a whole-body intensity score; it is the tone the brainstem sets on the cortex, and a person can be fully awake in this meaning while calm on the affective axis.[4]
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