Unpleasantness of Thinking

This week I would like to share a SoTL article that I found interesting and was able to connect to an earlier article that I shared on October 22, 2016 entitled Sequences of Frustration and Confusion, and Learning (2013) by Liu et al. This week’s article is entitled “The unpleasantness of thinking: A meta-analytic review of the association between mental effort and negative affect” (law of less work) by Vassena and Bijleveld (2024).

The authors meta-analyzed

whether mental effort is generally experienced as aversive; and
whether the association between mental effort and aversive feelings depends on population and tasks.

They analyzed 125 articles published from 2019–2020. These studies were conducted in a variety of populations (e.g., health care employees, military employees, amateur athletes, college students; data were collected in 29 different countries) and used a variety of tasks (e.g., equipment testing, virtual reality, cognitive performance). Overall, mental effort felt aversive in different types of tasks, in different types of populations and on different continents. This finding is important for those who design instruction. When students are required to exert substantial mental effort, it is sensible to support them by providing structure, balancing demanding tasks with tasks that foster engagement, and highlighting achievements.

The authors note that people may learn that exerting mental effort is likely to lead to reward. They suggest that this does not imply that people enjoy the mental effort that is involved. People higher in the need for cognition either

place greater value on the rewards associated with mentally effortful activities (mastery, self-efficacy, competence) or
experience a higher probability of these rewards (because they perform well at mentally effortful activities).

Under this assumption, people higher in need for cognition assign higher expected value to mentally effortful activities and, thus, are more likely to seek out mentally effortful activities and are more likely to receive and enjoy the rewards associated with these activities. Yet, even for people high in need for cognition, the expenditure of mental effort may feel unpleasant.

BONUS: A colleague (thanks rick!) shared an interesting learning program released by Google this week. Google Illuminate is a tool that transforms text into audio, designed to enhance learning and by providing a more accessible and immersive experience. You can use your current Google account to access. At this point, this is experimental and you will have to click on the “Waitlist” feature, although it only took a couple of days for me to gain access.

Key features:

Text-to-Audio Conversion: For articles, or books into audio format.
Personalized Learning: Adjust playback speed and voice options.
Accessibility: Make materials more accessible for those with visual impairments.

Potential Use Cases:

Students: Study textbooks, research papers, and notes more efficiently.
Faculty: Stay updated on industry news and trends through audio summaries.
Individuals with Learning Disabilities: Create a more accessible experience.
Language Learners: Practice listening comprehension and pronunciation.

The biggest drawback at this time is that we can only use papers from arXiv, an open-access archive for over two million scholarly articles. I used this paper to create an audio file, which was easy and resulted in a pretty good conversation.

References

David, L., Vassena, E., & Bijleveld, E. (2024). The unpleasantness of thinking: A meta-analytic review of the association between mental effort and negative affect. Psychological Bulletin. Advance online publication. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/bul0000443

Liu, Z., Pataranutaporn, V., Ocumpaugh, J., & Baker, R. (2013). Sequences of Frustration and Confusion, and Learning. EDM.

James, W. (1880). The feeling of effort. The Boston Society of Natural History.