Pleasure as a Sign of Efficacy of Mental Activity

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Abstract
Previous work has shown that sensory pleasure is both the motor and the sign of optimal behaviors aimed at physiological ends. From an evolutionary psychology point of view it may be postulated that mental pleasure evolved from sensory pleasure. Accordingly, the present work tested empirically the hypothesis that pleasure signals efficacious mental activity. In Experiment 1, ten subjects played video-golf on a Macintosh computer. After each hole they were invited to rate their pleasure or displeasure on a magnitude estimation scale. Their ratings of pleasure correlated negatively with the difference par minus performance, i.e., the better the performance the greater the pleasure reported. In Experiments 2 and 3, the pleasure of reading poems was correlated with comprehension, both rated by two groups of subjects, science students and arts students. In the majority of science students pleasure was significantly correlated with comprehension. Only one arts student showed this relationship; this result suggests that the proposed relationship between pleasure and cognitive efficiency is not tautological. Globally, the results support the hypothesis that pleasure is aroused by the same mechanisms, and follows the same laws, in physiological and cognitive mental tasks and also leads to the optimization of performance.

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