Effort and delay influence choices about relief

Relief from aversive states/contexts is among the most common motivators of behavior. Relative to reward-seeking behavior, however, relief-seeking behavior has received little scientific attention, and basic questions about the motivating properties of relief remain unanswered. Prior research has demonstrated that people prefer smaller rewards if they require less effort and less delay (i.e., wait time) than larger rewards, a tendency known as discounting. Here we asked whether effort and delay similarly influence choices about relief. To answer this question, we recruited 43 adults to complete two novel behavioral tasks designed to index tradeoffs between the cost of effort or delay, and the benefit of relief. We then compared the fit of a series of mathematical discount functions to participants’ choices in each task to identify how increased effort or delay leads to a discounted value of relief. Results suggest that the value of relief is discounted as a function of increasing effort and increasing delay. We further found that, similar to prior research on rewards, a parabolic discount model best accounted for the tradeoff between effort and relief. However, unlike previous findings on reward, a linear discount model best accounted for the tradeoff between delay and relief. Our results demonstrate that effort and delay are costs that influence choices about relief and also identify best-fitting discount models that can be used by future studies of relief-based decisions.