The Heart of Effort: Revealing Heart Rate Patterns in Real-Effort Tasks

Many laboratory experiments use real-effort tasks to increase the external validity of their findings. Real-effort tasks activate emotional reactions that are absent in stated-effort tasks. But there is little evidence whether and to which extent emotional reactions differ between participants, and how they affect effort provision. Since self-reported measures can be sensitive to the experimental context, we use heart rate measurements to investigate how participants feel during the task. We conducted a real-effort experiment with 84 participants and collected heart rate data with Polar H10 Heart Rate Sensors. We applied time series clustering on the heart rate data, focusing on shape-based distance (SBD) and k-shape clustering for analysis. The results demonstrate differences in heart rate patterns
among participant clusters, but not in effort provision. This research contributes to a better understanding of emotional reactions during real-effort tasks and offers a novel approach to studying these emotions using heart rate measurements.