ArticleAnnals of the New York Academy of Sciences2025
The pleasure of effort: Cognitive challenges trigger hedonic physiological responses.
Article in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Interest and effort in learning and performance.The British journal of educational psychology · 2026Article
- The experience of cognitive conflict is intrinsically rewarding.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- The pleasure of effort: Cognitive challenges trigger hedonic physiological responses.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Challenging prominent neuroscientific conceptions of effort as generally aversive, recent research suggests that people can learn to seek effort. Importantly, it is unknown whether people once they learn to value effort for its instrumentality, experience pleasure when engaging in effortful tasks. In this preregistered study (N = 194), we tested the hypothesis that effort-contingent rewards in a cognitive task will induce reward-related hedonic facial responses before, during, or after effortful engagement in a subsequent non-incentivized task. The results showed that effort-contingent reward enhanced participants' facial responses in the zygomaticus major (ZM) muscle after effort exertion (consumption phase) in the subsequent non-incentivized task, especially in high-difficulty trials. Electrical activity in the ZM was positively associated with subjective pleasure ratings in the experimental group when solving difficult trials, suggesting that it is implicitly tracking the hedonic value of effort. Our findings show that effort-contingent reward promotes effort-related reward experience, indicating that effort itself becomes intrinsically rewarding as experienced pleasure after effort exertion.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.