Thermal deactivation can be described either by deactivation kinetics or by the isokinetic effect. The latter expression is used synonymously with the "compensation effect" and the "ThetaRule". An examination of the original literature shows that only the compensation effect is applicable to thermal deactivation but not the Theta-Rule. The introduction of the preparation temperature as a parameter of the compensation effect results in a "modified Theta-Rule", which describes the experimental data and is proposed for the non-separable kinetics. The consequence of the observed deviations from the validity range of the Theta-Rule is that the activation energy cannot be used as a universal activity criterion.