A spring in your step: some is good, more is not always better

The contraction strength of muscles is regulated by motor neurons, which modulate the frequency of action potentials dispatched to the motor units based on the body's requirements. This process of varying the muscle stimulation frequency allows muscles to contract with a force that is precisely tailored to the needs of the moment, whether lifting a feather or a heavy box.
Wave summation
At low firing rates, motor neurons induce individual twitch contractions in muscle fibers. These twitches...

One influential perspective on what motivates people's behavior is detailed in Tory Higgin's self-discrepancy theory (Higgins, 1987). He proposed that people hold disagreeing internal representations of themselves that lead to different emotional states.

A mass attached to a vertical spring can exhibit oscillatory motion as it moves above and below a central equilibrium point. In an ideal spring, the oscillations would continue indefinitely with constant amplitude. In a damped spring, however, resistive forces such as air resistance or internal friction gradually reduce the size of each swing. This behavior is often modeled by combining a sinusoidal function, which represents the repeated motion, with an exponential decay factor, which reduces...

Not all intergroup interactions lead to negative outcomes. Sometimes, being in a group situation can improve performance. Social facilitation occurs when an individual performs better when an audience is watching than when the individual performs the behavior alone. This typically occurs when people are performing a task for which they are skilled.

One interesting characteristic of the simple harmonic motion (SHM) of an object attached to a spring is that the angular frequency, and the period and frequency of the motion, depend only on the mass and the force constant of the spring, and not on other factors such as the amplitude of the motion or initial conditions. We can use the equations of motion and Newton's second law to find the angular frequency, frequency, and period.
Consider a block on a spring on a frictionless surface. There...

To determine the energy of a simple harmonic oscillator, consider all the forms of energy it can have during its simple harmonic motion. According to Hooke's Law, the energy stored during the compression/stretching of a string in a simple harmonic oscillator is potential energy. As the simple harmonic oscillator has no dissipative forces, it also possesses kinetic energy. In the presence of conservative forces, both energies can interconvert during oscillation, but the total energy remains...