effortfulness

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In psychology, effortfulness is the subjective experience of exertion when performing an activity, especially the mental concentration and energy required. In many applications, effortfulness is simply reported by a patient, client, or experimental subject. There has been some work establishing an association among reported effortfulness and objective measures, such as in brain imaging. Effortfulness is used as a diagnostic indicator in medical and psychological diagnosis and assessment. It is also used as an indicator in psychological experimentation, especially in the field of memory.{{citation |page=262 |title=Language, Memory, and Aging |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1993 |isbn=9780521448765}}

In the study of aging, Patrick Rabbitt proposed an effortfulness hypothesis in the 1960s: that as their hearing became less acute with age, people would require additional effort to make out what was said and that this effort made it harder to remember it.{{citation |title=Aging, Hearing Acuity, and the Attentional Costs of Effortful Listening |author1=Tun |author2=McCoy |author3=Wingfield |year=2009 |volume= 24|number=3 |pages=761–766 |doi=10.1037/a0014802 |pmid=19739934 |pmc=2773464 |journal=Psychology and Aging}}