Scientists reveal it really does hurt to think

By Stephen Beech via SWNS

It really does hurt to think sometimes, according to new research.

Scientists say that if someone complains that it hurts to think, they may be onto something.

Mental exertion appears to be associated with unpleasant feelings in many situations, according to a new study published in the journal Psychological Bulletin .

Senior author Professor Erik Bijleveld, of Radboud University in Holland , said: “Managers often encourage employees, and teachers often encourage students, to exert mental effort.

"On the surface, this seems to work well: employees and students do often opt for mentally challenging activities.

“From this, you may be tempted to conclude that employees and students tend to enjoy thinking hard.

"Our results suggest that this conclusion would be false: In general, people really dislike mental effort.”

The Dutch research team conducted an analysis of 170 previous studies, published between 2019 and 2020 and comprising 4,670 participants, to examine how people generally experience mental effort.

The team did so by testing whether mental effort is associated with unpleasant feelings and whether that association depends on the task or the population involved.

The studies used a variety of participants, from military employees to amateur athletes, in 29 countries and involved 358 different cognitive tasks.

In all the studies analyzed, participants reported the level of effort they exerted as well as the extent to which they experienced unpleasant feelings such as frustration, irritation, stress or annoyance.

Across all the different groups and tasks, Bijleveld says the greater the mental effort, the greater the unpleasantness experienced by participants.

He said: “Our findings show that mental effort feels unpleasant across a wide range of populations and tasks.

“This is important for professionals, such as engineers and educators, to keep in mind when designing tasks, tools, interfaces, apps, materials or instructions.

"When people are required to exert substantial mental effort, you need to make sure to support or reward them for their effort.”

Bijleveld said that another interesting finding was that while the association between mental effort and adverse feelings was still significant, it was less pronounced in studies conducted in Asian countries compared with those in Europe or North America.

He says that fits with the general idea that the aversiveness of mental effort may depend on people’s learning history.

Bijleveld says high school students in Asian countries tend to spend more time on schoolwork than their European or North American counterparts and may therefore learn to withstand higher levels of mental exertion early on in their lives..

But he said that more important is the real-world observation that despite the aversive nature of mentally challenging tasks, people still voluntarily engage in them.

Bijleveld said: “For example, why do millions of people play chess?

"People may learn that exerting mental effort in some specific activities is likely to lead to reward. If the benefits of chess outweigh the costs, people may choose to play chess, and even self-report that they enjoy chess.

“Yet, when people choose to pursue mentally effortful activities, this should not be taken as an indication that they enjoy mental effort per se."

He added: "Perhaps people choose mentally effortful activities despite the effort, not because of it.”

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