Personal choice shields against affective influences on effort in a “do your best” task: Effects on cardiac response

This experiment ( N = 113) tested whether personal choice vs. external assignment of task characteristics moderates the effect of incidental affective stimulation on effort-related cardiovascular response in a “ do your best ” task context. When participants could choose themselves the color of the stimuli (i.e., a series of letters to be recalled) used in a memory task, we expected high task commitment and willingness to mobilize resources, strong action shielding, and thus low receptivity for incidental affective influences. By contrast, when the color was externally assigned, we expected low willingness to mobilize resources, weak action shielding, and thus strong affective influences on effort. As predicted, participants in the assigned color condition showed stronger cardiac pre-ejection period reactivity during task execution when exposed to sad music than when exposed to happy music. These music effects did not appear among participants who could personally choose the color. Here, effort was high independently of the happy or sad background music. The present study demonstrates the moderating effect of personal choice on resource mobilization in a task of unfixed difficulty with happy and sad background music as incidental affective influence. • Participants could choose task characteristics or were externally assigned to them. • During the task, participants tried to do their best and were exposed to happy or sad background music. • Without choice, sad music led to stronger cardiac PEP reactivity than happy music. • This music effect disappeared when participants got to personally choose their stimulus color.