Michael Richter

• PhD
• Reader at Liverpool John Moores University

Objectives Listening effort is moderated by not only task difficulty, but also success importance. In real communication scenarios, success importance varies based upon the social context. However, in the laboratory, it can be challenging to manipulate social context without compromising experimental control. Outside of hearing sciences, studies ha...

Listening effort and fatigue are common experiences when conversing in noisy environments. Much research has investigated listening effort in relation to listening demand using the speech-in-noise paradigm. Recent conceptualizations of listening effort postulate that mental fatigue should result in decreased arousal and a reluctance to invest furth...

About one-third of all recently published studies on listening effort have used at least one physiological measure, providing evidence of the popularity of such measures in listening effort research. However, the specific measures employed, as well as the rationales used to justify their inclusion, vary greatly between studies, leading to a literat...

Objectives: Listening effort and fatigue are common complaints among individuals with hearing impairment (HI); however, the underlying mechanisms, and relationships between listening effort and fatigue are not well understood. Recent quantitative research suggests that the peak pupil dilation (PPD), which is commonly measured concurrent to the perf...

This chapter presents a framework that aims at explaining stereotyping in older age. Previous studies have shown that older adults are more prone to exhibiting stereotyping and prejudice toward many social groups, compared to young adults. However, the model in this chapter suggests that these age-related increases in stereotyping might be compensa...

Work on physiological and other behavioral correlates of motives often assumes that motives exert a direct effect on behavior once activated. Motivational intensity theory, however, suggests that this does not always apply. In the context of task engagement, motive strength should exert a direct effect on myocardial beta-adrenergic activity if task...

Research on listening effort has used various physiological measures to examine the biological correlates of listening effort but a systematic examination of the impact of listening demand on cardiac autonomic nervous system activity is still lacking. The presented study aimed to close this gap by assessing cardiac sympathetic and parasympathetic r...

Integrating the achievement motive literature and motivational intensity theory, we expected the implicit achievement motive (nAch) to directly determine effort mobilization when task difficulty is unclear. However, nAch should interact with task difficulty in determining effort mobilization when task difficulty is clear. Participants worked on an...

The Action–Trait theory of human motivation posits that individual differences in predispositional traits of action may account for variance in contemporary purposeful human behavior. Prior research has supported the theory, psychometric properties of scales designed to assess the motive dimensions of the theory, and the utility of these scales to...

Certain cardiovascular measures allow for distinction between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activity. Applied during listening, these measures may provide a novel and complementary insight into listening effort. To date, few studies have implemented cardiovascular measures of listening effort and seldom have these included hearing-...

Attaining sports or health goals requires not only high motivation but also the willpower to translate sport-behavior intentions into successful action. This volitional regulation calls for the mobilization of effort to overcome obstacles in the pursuit of goals. The present article provides a theoretical and empirical overview of motivation intens...

Stable personality dispositions, like motives, are often assumed to exert a direct, stable impact on behavior. This also applies to the explicit achievement motive, which is supposed to influence the behavior that individuals select and how strongly they engage in it. Drawing on motivational intensity theory, we demonstrated in two studies that exp...

According to motivational intensity theory, individuals are motivated to conserve energy when pursuing goals. They should invest only the energy required for success and disengage if success is not important enough to justify the required energy. We tested this hypothesis in five experiments assessing exerted muscle force in isometric hand grip tas...

The goals of this research were to analyze cardiac sympathetic recovery patterns and evaluate whether sympathetic cardiac responses to a task challenge can be predicted using residual cardiac activity measured directly after the task (that is, during the recovery period). In two studies (total N = 181), we measured cardiac sympathetic activity, qua...

Objectives: Effort investment during listening varies as a function of task demand and motivation. Several studies have manipulated both these factors to elicit and measure changes in effort associated with listening. The cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP) is a relatively novel measure in the field of cognitive hearing science. This measure, which...

Theories of human temporal perception suggest that changes in physiological arousal distort the perceived duration of events. Behavioural manipulations of sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity support this suggestion, however the effects of behavioural manipulations of parasympathetic (PSNS) activity on time perception are unclear. The current...

The goal of this study was to investigate the patterns of engagement among professional firefighters during a rescue operation challenge simulated in a virtual reality (VR). The simulator offers a training that would otherwise be impossible or very difficult to arrange in the real world, here a mass-casualty incident. We measured engagement with ca...

What determines effort intensity in instrumental behavior? According to motivation intensity theory, effort should be proportional to experienced task difficulty as long as success is possible and justified and low when success is impossible or excessively difficult, given the available benefit. When task difficulty is unspecified or unknown, effor...

In contrast to the motive literature, motivational intensity theory predicts that the implicit achievement motive (nAch) should only exert an indirect impact on effort by limiting the impact of task difficulty. To contrast these two views, sixty-eight participants with a low or high nAch performed an easy or difficult arithmetic task. Effort was as...

Theoretical models of time perception suggest a simple bottom-up relationship between physiological arousal and perceived duration. Increases in physiological arousal lengthen the perceived duration of events whereas decreases in physiological arousal reduce them. Whilst this relationship has been demonstrated for highly arousing negatively valence...

A study with young and older adults (N = 91) investigated the effect of self-involvement on stereotyping tendency and effort mobilization. We hypothesized that the impact of self-involvement varies as a function of age: increased self-involvement should lead older adults to engage in more effortful information processing and decreased stereotyping,...

The ability to adjust attentional focus to varying levels of task demands depends on the adaptive recruitment of cognitive control processes. The present study investigated for the first time whether the mobilization of cognitive control during response-conflict trials in a flanker task is associated with effort-related sympathetic activity as meas...

Motivation scientists employing physiological measures to gather information about motivation-related states are at risk of committing two fundamental errors: overstating the inferences that can be drawn from their physiological measures and circular reasoning. We critically discuss two complementary approaches, Cacioppo and colleagues' model of ps...

Figure 1. Motivational intensity theory's predictions for tasks with known and fixed difficulty (Panels A and B) and for tasks with unknown and unfixed difficulty (Panel C).

A common element of the psychophysiological research on listening effort is the focus on listening demand as determinant of effort. The article discusses preceding studies and theorizing on effort to show that the link between listening demand and listening effort is moderated by various variables. Moreover, I will present a recent study that exami...

The Fifth Eriksholm Workshop on "Hearing Impairment and Cognitive Energy" was convened to develop a consensus among interdisciplinary experts about what is known on the topic, gaps in knowledge, the use of terminology, priorities for future research, and implications for practice. The general term cognitive energy was chosen to facilitate the broad...

Motivational intensity theory predicts that energy investment in goal pursuit is governed by the motivation to conserve resources and that it should consequently be a function of task demand: Trying to avoid wasting resources, individuals should invest only the energy that is required for task success and should disengage if success is impossible....

Rosenbaum et al. (2014) announced in a recent Psychological Science paper the discovery of a new psychological phenomenon. They presented nine studies on task choice in a bucket carrying task and claimed that the results of these studies provide evidence for pre-crastination, the tendency to complete (sub)tasks as soon as possible, even if this com...

It is current practice that researchers testing specific, theory-driven predictions do not only use a planned contrast to model and test their hypotheses, but also test the residual variance (the C+R approach). This analysis strategy relies on work by Abelson and Prentice (1997), who suggested that the result of a planned contrast needs to be inter...

Multiple arousal theory suggests that there is more than one arousal system and that the activity of the multiple arousal systems can be observed using electrodermal measures at various body sites. The ideas expressed by multiple arousal theory are interesting but they do not constitute a theory. The absence of a specific definition of arousal and...

According to motivational intensity theory, energy investment in goal pursuit is determined by the motivation to avoid wasting energy. Two experiments tested this hypothesis by manipulating the difficulty of an isometric and grip task across four levels in a between-persons (Study 1) and a within-persons (Study 2) design. Supporting motivational in...

Motivation science is concerned with processes that govern behavior, specifically those that determine its initiation, direction, intensity, and persistence. Among the processes addressed by motivation theorists are ones related to effort. In psychology, discussions of effort trace back at least to Ach (1910, 1935) and Hillgruber (1912), who consid...

Self-regulation researchers have frequently compared self-regulation with a muscle postulating that self-regulatory activity resembles muscle activity. Self-regulation and muscle activity are supposed to require both energy resources and the depletion of these resources should underlie the performance decline after a strenuous self-regulatory activ...

Gendolla and colleagues have consistently found that negative mood leads to higher effort-related cardiovascular reactivity than positive mood if performers can choose their own performance standard (Gendolla, Abele, & Krüsken, 2001; Gendolla & Krüsken, 2001a, 2002a, 2002b). However, an integration of motivational intensity theory with the mood lit...

We welcome the development of a new model on effort and performance and the critique on existing resource-based models. However, considering the vast evidence for the significant impact of experienced task demand on resource allocation, we conclude that Kurzban et al.'s opportunity cost model is only valid for one performance condition: if task dem...

Drawing on the idea that humans aim to avoid wasting energy that is important for survival, motivational intensity theory postulates that task difficulty and success importance determine energy investment. Additionally, the theory makes predictions on how task characteristics moder- ate the relationship between task difficulty, success importance,...

An experiment assessed the joint effect of dispositional need for closure (NFC) and task difficulty on engagement-related myocardial beta-adrenergic activity. Participants who scored either low or high on the NFC scale performed an ambiguous categorization task with either low or high difficulty. Confirming the theory-derived predictions, task diff...

Without Abstract Synonyms Autonomic arousal; Autonomic reactivity Definition Autonomic activation refers to an increase in the activity of the autonomic nervous system, the physical system responsible for nonconsciously maintaining bodily homeostasis and coordinating bodily responses. It is assessed by comparing autonomic values obtained during a t...

In this article it is proposed that the principles of motivational intensity theory (Brehm & Self, 1989) apply to effort mobilization for challenges with consequences for performers' self-esteem and self-definition (i.e., self-involvement). Accordingly, involvement of the self makes success important and thus justifies the mobilization of high reso...

Insomniacs often complain of memory deficits, yet objective measures have not consistently corroborated their subjective impressions. A possible explanation for the partial gap between self-report and behavioral measures of memory impairment is that insomniacs recruit extra effort to compensate for the consequences of poor sleep. The present study...

Two experiments assessed the moderating impact of task context on the relationship between reward and cardiovascular response. Randomly assigned to the cells of a 2 (task context: reward vs. demand) x 2 (reward value: low vs. high) between-persons design, participants performed either a memory task with an unclear performance standard (Experiment 1...

Research in the context of the mood-behavior-model (Gendolla in Rev Gen Psychol 4:348–408, 2000) has shown that moods can have an impact on effort mobilization due to congruency effects on demand appraisals. However, the mood research literature suggests that mood may also influence effort mobilization by its impact on appraisals of the instrumenta...

Wright's (1996) integration of motivational intensity theory (Brehm & Self, 1989) and Obrist's (1981) active coping approach predict that cardiovascular reactivity in active coping depends on the importance of success when task difficulty is unclear. Despite the support for this perspective, one of the basic hypotheses-the mediation of these effect...

An experiment with 64 participants manipulated task difficulty and assessed cardiac reactivity in active coping over four levels of demand. Participants performed a memory task while preejection period, heart rate, and blood pressure were assessed. In accordance with the theoretical predictions of R. A. Wright's (1996) integration of motivational i...

Two experiments examined the joint impact of self-focused attention and task difficulty on performance-related cardiovascular reactivity. Predictions were derived from an application of the principles of motivational intensity theory and its integration with the active coping approach to performance conditions that have consequences for self-esteem...

An experiment with 44 participants assessed the moderating effects of four levels of incentive value on cardiovascular responses in active coping. Randomly assigned to one of four different incentive conditions, participants performed a memory task without knowing its difficulty in advance. By means of successfully performing the task participants...

An integrative theory about mood and motivation--the mood-behavior-model (MBM) (Gendolla, 2000)--is presented and the results of related studies on mood and motivational intensity are discussed. A series of experiments with implications for motivation in organizational and educational settings assessed motivational intensity as cardiovascular react...

An experiment with N=40 university students investigated the impact of social observation on cardiovascular reactivity during performance on a computer-based letter detection task. The study was conducted in a 2 (social observation: no vs. yes)x2 (task difficulty: easy vs. difficult) between-persons design. In accordance with engagement-related pre...

Two experiments found that effort-related cardiovascular reactivity under ego-involvement follows the principles of motivational intensity theory. Experiment 1 manipulated ego-involvement and the difficulty of a memory task. Under high ego-involvement, cardiovascular reactivity during task performance increased with fixed task difficulty; an unfixe...

Two experiments with a total of 96 participants assessed cardiovascular response in active coping. The studies were run in 2x2 designs and manipulated the clarity of task difficulty (clear vs. unclear) and incentive value (low vs. high) of a memory task, which was either easy (Experiment 1) or extremely difficult (Experiment 2). In accordance with...

An experiment with N=52 university students manipulated ego involvement (low vs. high) and task difficulty (unfixed vs. easy) of a letter detection task. In accordance with the theoretical predictions about the role of ego involvement in active coping, high ego involvement increased the performance-related reactivity of systolic blood pressure, dia...

A joint impact hypothesis on symptom experience is introduced that specifies the role of negative mood and self-focus, which have been considered independently in previous research. Accordingly, negative affect only promotes symptom experience when people simultaneously focus their attention on the self. One correlational study and 4 experiments su...