ADHD
How Do ADHD Symptoms Affect the Felt Strain of Hard Mental Tasks?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
College students at risk for ADHD find challenging mental tasks more exhausting and uncomfortable than peers, even when their actual task performance is taken into account.
Key findings
The at-risk group reported significantly higher mental effort and discomfort during the task, and recalled the task as more unpleasant afterwards, even after researchers statistically controlled for actual performance accuracy. Additionally, for the at-risk group, peak moments of experienced effort strongly predicted their overall memories of task discomfort. Performance accuracy was also lower for the at-risk group on medium and hard math conditions, and their feelings of strain were more tightly linked to how poorly they performed.
Methodology
Researchers screened 431 university students and selected 235 participants, categorizing 136 as at-risk for ADHD and 99 as not at-risk based on a self-report symptom checklist. Participants completed a challenging computerized math and working memory task where they repeatedly added sequences of numbers. Throughout the task, participants rated their current levels of mental effort and physical discomfort, and afterwards, they retrospectively rated their overall memory of the task's strain.
Limitations
Because this study evaluated university students using a screening tool rather than a clinical interview, these findings may not apply to clinically diagnosed individuals or the broader public. The proportion of at-risk individuals in the sample was 31.6 percent, which is much higher than the typical diagnostic prevalence of about 11 percent. Furthermore, the correlational nature of the ratings means we cannot determine if feeling discomfort causes poorer performance or if experiencing struggling performance directly causes the discomfort.
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