No hard feelings: Contributors to mood and performance in extended effortful tasks – Job Talk

Abstract: People choose to perform actions based on their expected outcomes. Yet even after a choice has been made, it remains unclear why people struggle to persist in tasks over time, when outcomes and expectations remain unchanged. In this talk, I will present recent works which aim to quantify the "effortfulness" of performance and show that people feel better or worse in effortful tasks in accordance with task duration biases (i.e., duration prediction error). I will focus on six lab experiments (Ntotal ≅ 820; three preregistered), in which we led participants to believe that effortful attentional or motor tasks lasted longer, shorter, or the same as their actual duration, corresponding to negative, positive, and neutral prediction errors, respectively. We found that both mood and performance are systematically affected by duration prediction errors, and that this effect is moderated by the extent to which the task is subjectively effortful. These findings suggest that endpoints of effortful tasks might serve as rewarding outcomes in themselves, which can act as learning signals for facilitating emotional states and behavioral adaptations. A complementary survey revealed that people tend to underestimate the duration of effortful long-term goals (e.g., losing weight), potentially fostering negative emotional states and disengagement once initial expectations are violated. I will further discuss the implications of these findings to everyday phenomena, and the design of behavioral paradigms. Finally, I will outline my future research plans, including further exploring motivational phenomenology and applying these findings to interventions in disease prevention, rehabilitation, and mental health.