ArticleScientific reports2019
The transdiagnostic structure of mental effort avoidance.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- A least action principle for interceptive walking.Scientific reports · 2021Trial
- Executive functions as a transdiagnostic endophenotype in developmental psychopathology.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Review
- Demand avoidance in value-based choice under risk: A behavioral and pupillometric examination.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Shared and distinct features of common effort-based decision-making paradigms and their relation to brain structure and neuropsychiatric conditions: An integrated narrative review.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Disentangling the effects of task difficulty and effort on flow experience.Psychological research · 2025Article
- Exaggerated frontoparietal control over cognitive effort-based decision-making in young women with anorexia nervosa.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- Social Effort Discounting Reveals Domain-General and Social-Specific Motivation Components.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
- The experience of mental effort during a continuous performance task: Exploring the influence of task- and person-based factors.PloS one · 2025Article
- Choosing the right frame: how context preferences facilitate subsequent decisions.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Major depression symptom severity associations with willingness to exert effort and patch foraging strategy.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
- The experience of effort in ADHD: a scoping review.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Effort Foraging Task reveals positive correlation between individual differences in the cost of cognitive and physical effort in humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Investigating links between creativity anxiety, creative performance, and state-level anxiety and effort during creative thinking.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Learned industriousness as a translational mechanism in anorexia nervosa.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Article
- Is it cognitive effort you measure? Comparing three task paradigms to the Need for Cognition scale.PloS one · 2023Article
- Brain stimulation over dorsomedial prefrontal cortex modulates effort-based decision making.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Preferences for seeking effort or reward information bias the willingness to work.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Cognitive effort avoidance in veterans with suicide attempt histories.Acta psychologica · 2022Article
- Exploration heuristics decrease during youth.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The law of least mental effort states that, everything else being equal, the brain tries to minimize mental effort expenditure during task performance by avoiding decisions that require greater cognitive demands. Prior studies have shown associations between disruptions in effort expenditure and specific psychiatric illnesses (e.g., schizophrenia and depression) or clinically-related symptoms and traits (e.g., anhedonia and apathy), yet no research has explored this issue transdiagnostically. Specifically, this research has largely focused on a single diagnostic category, symptom, or trait. However, abnormalities in effort expression could be related to several different psychiatrically-relevant constructs that cut across diagnostic boundaries. Therefore, we examined the relationship between avoidance of mental effort and a diverse set of clinically-related symptoms and traits, and transdiagnostic latent factors in a large sample (n = 811). Only lack of perseverance, a dimension of impulsiveness, was associated with increased avoidance of mental effort. In contrast, several constructs were associated with less mental effort avoidance, including positive urgency, distress intolerance, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, disordered eating, and a factor consisting of compulsive behavior and intrusive thoughts. These findings demonstrate that deviations from normative effort expenditure are associated with a number of constructs that are common to several forms of psychiatric illness.
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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 OpenQuestion graph.