Three bipolar semantic differential adjective pairs tap a person's global evaluation of how easy and enjoyable a task was to perform -- ranging from difficult to easy, frustrating to enjoyable, and annoying to fun. The scale captures both the cognitive effort dimension (difficulty) and the affective experience dimension (frustration/annoyance vs. enjoyability/fun) of task engagement, providing a compact measure of task ease that integrates ability and hedonic appraisals.
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The source of the scale was not identified; it appears to have been developed by the study's authors. The scale uses a semantic differential format and was validated across two MTurk studies. In Study 2, the items were completed three times -- once per task -- and alphas were calculated by averaging all nine responses, which likely inflated alpha above what a single-task administration would produce. Study 3 administered the items once, yielding an alpha of .79 which is the more representative reliability estimate for single-task deployment. The scale was used as a manipulation check in Study 3; successful detection of the difficulty manipulation provides limited evidence of predictive validity. Instructions should clearly identify the focal task before participants rate it.
Soster, R. L., Gershoff, A. D., & Bearden, W. O. (2014). The bottom dollar effect: The influence of spending to zero on pain of payment and satisfaction. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(3), 656-677.
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