Opportunity cost calculations only determine justified effort-Or, What happened to the resource conservation principle?

We welcome the development of a new model on effort and performance and the critique on existing resource-based models. However, considering the vast evidence for the significant impact of experienced task demand on resource allocation, we conclude that Kurzban et al.'s opportunity cost model is only valid for one performance condition: if task demand is unknown or unspecifie

Affective regulation of cognitive-control adjustments in remitted depressive patients after acute tryptophan depletion

Negative affect in healthy populations regulates the appraisal of demanding situations, which tunes subsequent effort mobilization and adjustments in cognitive control. In the present study, we hypothesized that dysphoria in depressed individuals similarly modulates this adaptation, possibly through a neural mechanism involving serotonergic regulation. We tested the effect of dysphoria induced by acute tryptophan depletion (ATD) in remitted depressed patients on conflict adaptation in a Simon task. ATD temporarily lowers the availability of the serotonin precursor L-Tryptophan and is known to increase depressive symptoms in approximately half of remitted depressed participants. We found that depressive symptoms induced by ATD were associated with increased conflict adaptation. Our finding extends recent observations implying an important role of affect in regulating conflict-driven cognitive control

Dreaming of white bears: the return of the suppressed at sleep onset

Abstract The present study examined the effects of thought suppression on sleep-onset mentation. It was hypothesized that the decrease of attentional control in the transition to sleep would lead to a rebound of a suppressed thought in hypnagogic mentation. Twenty-four young adults spent two consecutive nights in a sleep laboratory. Half of the participants were instructed to suppress a target thought, whereas the other half freely thought of anything at all. To assess target thought frequency, three different measures were used in the wake state and mentation reports were repeatedly prompted by a computer at sleep onset. In support of the hypothesis, results revealed a reversal of target thought frequency at sleep onset: Participants instructed to suppress reported fewer target thoughts than did controls before falling asleep, but more target thoughts afterwards

Pain and Gain: Monetary Incentive Moderates Pain’s Impact on Effort-Related Cardiac Response

Two experiments tested the combined effect of pain and monetary incentive on effort-related cardiovascular response during cognitive performance. Healthy volunteers received individually adjusted painful or nonpainful thermal stimulations during a difficult cognitive task and expected high or low monetary incentive for successful performance. Our primary cardiovascular effort measure were responses of cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP) during task performance. Based on the pain literature suggesting that pain adds supplementary demand in cognitive functioning, we predicted pain to increase subjective task difficulty. Moreover, based on motivational intensity theory, we expected this to increase effort only when high effort was justified by high monetary incentive. Correspondingly, we predicted pain to lead to low effort due to disengagement when monetary incentive was low. Effort in the nonpainful conditions was expected to fall in between these conditions. The results of both studies offered support to our predictions. Our findings provide the first evidence for the moderating effect of monetary incentive on physical pain’s impact on effort. This suggests that motivational incentives can counteract effort deficits associated with pain. Clinical implications are discussed

Implicit happiness and sadness are associated with ease and difficulty: evidence from sequential priming

Three experiments tested the hypothesis of implicit associations between happiness and the performance ease concept and between sadness and the performance difficulty concept. All three studies applied a sequential priming paradigm: participants categorized emotion words (Experiment 1) or facial expressions (Experiment 2) as positive or negative or as referring to ease or difficulty (Experiment 3). These targets were preceded by briefly flashed ease- or difficulty-related words or neutral non-words (Experiments 1 and 2) or by happy, sad, or neutral facial expressions (Experiment 3) as primes. As predicted, all three experiments revealed increases in reaction times in the sequential priming task from congruent trials (happiness/ease and sadness/difficulty) over neutral trials to incongruent trials (sadness/ease and happiness/difficulty). The findings provide evidence for implicit associative links of happiness with ease and sadness with difficulty, as posited by the implicit-affect-primes-effort model (Gendolla, Int J Psychophysiol 86:123-135, 2012; Soc Pers Psychol Compass 9:606-619, 2015)