Motivations underlying self-infliction of pain during thinking for pleasure.

Previous research suggested that people prefer to administer unpleasant electric shocks to themselves rather than being left alone with their thoughts because engagement in thinking is an unpleasant activity. The present research examined this negative reinforcement hypothesis by giving participants a choice of distracting themselves with the generation of electric shock causing no to intense pain. Four experiments (N = 254) replicated the result that a large proportion of participants opted to administer painful shocks to themselves during the thinking period. However, they administered strong electric shocks to themselves even when an innocuous response option generating no or a mild shock was available. Furthermore, participants inflicted pain to themselves when they were assisted in the generation of pleasant thoughts during the waiting period, with no difference between pleasant versus unpleasant thought conditions. Overall, these results question that the primary motivation for the self-administration of painful shocks is avoidance of thinking. Instead, it seems that the self-infliction of pain was attractive for many participants, because they were curious about the shocks, their intensities, and the effects they would have on them.

Move&Find: The Value of Kinaesthetic Experience in a Casual Data Representation.

The value of a data representation is traditionally judged based on aspects like effectiveness and efficiency that are important in utilitarian or work-related contexts. Most multisensory data representations, however, are employed in casual contexts where creativity, affective, physical, intellectual, and social engagement might be of greater value. We introduce Move&Find, a multisensory data representation in which people pedalled on a bicycle to exert the energy required to power a search query on Google's servers. To evaluate Move&Find, we operationalized a framework suitable to evaluate the value of data representations in casual contexts and experimentally compared Move&Find to a corresponding visualization. With Move&Find, participants achieved a higher understanding of the data. Move&Find was judged to be more creative and encouraged more physical and social engagement-components of value that would have been missed using more traditional evaluation frameworks.