Mental effort appears to be associated with unpleasant feelings in many situations.
- Mental effort is unpleasant for a wide range of populations and tasks.
- The link between mental effort and negative feelings is less pronounced in research conducted in Asian countries, Europe or North America.
- When employees and students are required to exert substantial mental effort, it makes sense to support or reward them, the authors say.
Have you ever felt like your brain was on fire after a long study session or several work meetings? You’re probably not alone. According to a new study, published in the journal Psychological Bulletinthinking hard can lead to unpleasant feelings. To reach this conclusion, researchers from Radboud University (Netherlands) reviewed 170 studies, published between 2019 and 2020 and including 4,670 adults, to examine how people generally experience mental effort. Their goal? To verify whether mental effort is associated with unpleasant feelings and whether this association depends on the task or the population concerned.
Frustration, stress, irritation: a link between mental effort and negative feelings
The research involved a variety of participants, including healthcare workers, military personnel, amateur athletes, and university students, from 29 countries. They also performed 358 different cognitive tasks, such as learning a new technology, navigating an unfamiliar environment, practicing golf swings, and playing a virtual reality game. In all cohorts, volunteers reported how much effort they put in and how much unpleasant feelings they experienced, such as frustration, irritation, stress, or annoyance. “As expected, we found a strong positive association between mental effort and negative affect,” can be read in the results. In detail, the greater the mental effort, the more discomfort the volunteers felt.
The authors found that while the association between mental effort and negative feelings was always significant, it was less pronounced in research conducted in Asian countries, Europe, or North America. This is consistent with the general idea that the aversive nature of mental effort may depend on people’s learning history. “High school students in Asian countries tend to spend more time on homework than their European or North American counterparts and may therefore learn to tolerate higher levels of mental effort early in life.”
Support or reward people for their mental effort
More importantly, the team says, despite the aversive nature of mentally difficult tasks, people still engage in them voluntarily. “For example, why do millions of people play chess? People can learn that mental effort in specific activities is likely to result in a reward. If the benefits of chess outweigh the costs, people may choose to play chess and even report that they enjoy playing chess,” said Erik Bijleveldauthor of the works.
Thus in the conclusions, the scientists emphasize that it “It is important for professionals, such as engineers and educators, to keep this in mind when designing tasks, tools, interfaces, applications, materials, or instructions. When people have to exert significant mental effort, you need to make sure you support or reward them for their efforts.”
