For Whom the Pandemic Tolls: A Person-Centric Analysis of Older Workers.

We offer a worker-centric perspective on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic for the aging workforce. We briefly describe 3 broad characteristics of pandemics-mortality salience, isolation from the workplace, and rising unemployment-in terms of their associated pathways of influence on older workers, and recommendations for future research.

Subjective (dis)utility of effort: mentally and physically demanding tasks.

Effort as a concept, whether momentary, sustained, or as a function of different task conditions, is of critical importance to resource theories of attention, fatigue/boredom, workplace motivation, career selection, performance, job incentives, and other applied psychology concerns. Various models of motivation suggest that there is an inverted-U-shaped function describing the personal utility of effort, but there are expected to be individual differences in the optimal levels of effort that also are related to specific domain preferences. The current study assessed the disutility of effort for 125 different tasks/activities and also explored individual differences correlates of task preferences, in a sample of 77 undergraduate participants.