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Lost by definition: Why boredom matters for psychology and society

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Abstract

Long overlooked, boredom has drawn increasing attention across multiple subfields of psychology (including clinical, developmental, educational, cognitive, and industrial/organizational psychology), as well as economics, philosophy, neuroscience, and animal cognition. In this article, we review and integrate this work by providing a social psychological perspective on boredom as an emotion and its role in signaling the need for change to restore successful attention in meaningful activity. In doing so, we discuss the implications of that approach for understanding boredom cross‐culturally and cross‐species, and identify opportunities for targeted interventions to reduce boredom and improve well‐being.

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... A supplemented cosine-similarity analysis that aims to further characterize the differences between the results from the primary Facebook dataset and the secondary questionnaire dataset is provided in the Supplementary Material. theories emphasized the potentially positive role of boredom, which could encourage people to seek change and engage in creative and meaningful activities (45,46). However, in many cases, the experience of boredom seems to trigger negative emotions (47) and even psychopathologies (48), including mainly depression. ...
... Similarly, the developers of the brief State Boredom Measure (SBM) reported that all of its eight items correlated positively with depression (0.19 ≤ r ≤ 0.59) (17). These psychometric data alongside the aforementioned theoretical statements about "overlapping symptomology" bring forth an unsettling discriminant validity issue whereby boredom is not clearly differentiated from depression (46). ...
... Although boredom is a very common experience, its negative implications may be undervalued, both in the literature and in the clinical field. For some people, boredom may indeed feel like a relatively benign experience, or even a positive experience as it could lead to creative and novel ideas and activities, as well as meaningful positive change (45,46). However, for many people, boredom is perceived as a fairly aversive experience (41), and our findings suggest that it might even lead a person to engage in dangerous suicidal behaviors. ...
Article
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Background Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) contributed significantly to suicide assessment, however, our theoretical understanding of this complex behavior is still limited. Objective This study aimed to harness AI methodologies to uncover hidden risk factors that trigger or aggravate suicide behaviors. Methods The primary dataset included 228,052 Facebook postings by 1,006 users who completed the gold-standard Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale. This dataset was analyzed using a bottom-up research pipeline without a-priory hypotheses and its findings were validated using a top-down analysis of a new dataset. This secondary dataset included responses by 1,062 participants to the same suicide scale as well as to well-validated scales measuring depression and boredom. Results An almost fully automated, AI-guided research pipeline resulted in four Facebook topics that predicted the risk of suicide, of which the strongest predictor was boredom. A comprehensive literature review using APA PsycInfo revealed that boredom is rarely perceived as a unique risk factor of suicide. A complementing top-down path analysis of the secondary dataset uncovered an indirect relationship between boredom and suicide, which was mediated by depression. An equivalent mediated relationship was observed in the primary Facebook dataset as well. However, here, a direct relationship between boredom and suicide risk was also observed. Conclusion Integrating AI methods allowed the discovery of an under-researched risk factor of suicide. The study signals boredom as a maladaptive ‘ingredient’ that might trigger suicide behaviors, regardless of depression. Further studies are recommended to direct clinicians’ attention to this burdening, and sometimes existential experience.
... In support of this explanation, Chin et al. (2017) found that while individual differences account for some variance in people's boredom, most of it is due to situational factors. According to Westgate and Steidle's (2020) Meaning and Attentional Component (MAC) model of boredom, boredom is especially likely to arise when the individual's resources surpass the situation's demands and the current activity does not comply with valued goals. ...
... Over time, these attentional capabilities will be depleted. A lack of stimulation can thus lead to negative consequences, including negative feelings like irritability, frustration and displeasure (Westgate & Steidle, 2020), impulse control deficits such as drug and alcohol abuse (LePera, 2011), risk-taking (Steinberger et al., 2017) and impaired attentional performance (Freeman et al., 2004). Interestingly, Kaplan (1995) described similar negative consequences for those whose attentional capabilities have been diminished due to excessive demands for concentration on issues of little interest. ...
... Second, prior studies have shown that natural environments can be restorative for overstimulated people, both in terms of the recovery of attentional capabilities and positive affect (Hartig, 2021). At the same time, when suggesting opportunities for targeted interventions to reduce boredom, Westgate and Steidle (2020) propose that, when boredom is caused by a lack of demand (i.e., an understimulation situation), the individual should look for an interesting activity and/or increase the level of demand, provided these activities or challenges raise spontaneous attention. Because the depletion is supposed to be attentional we expect, in line with restoration theories, visual exposure to natural as compared to urban environments to be more restorative, i.e., increase attentional capabilities (H2a) and positive affect (H2b) for both underand over-stimulated children. ...
... Long neglected in affective science, boredom has seen a resurgence of interest in psychology as an important indicator of cognitive engagement and a motivator of behavioral change and self-regulation (e.g., Elpidorou, 2014;Lin & Westgate, in press;Milyavskaya et al., 2019;Westgate & Wilson, 2018;Wojtowicz et al., 2019). While some people may experience boredom more easily or more intensely than others (i.e., trait boredom, or "boredom proneness"), all of us experience the feeling of boredom at times (i.e., state boredom, as an emotion; see Fisher et al., 2018;Westgate & Steidle, 2020). 1 According to the Meaning and Attentional Components (MAC) model, such boredom signals a need to restore meaningful engagement due to a lack of meaning and/or attention (Westgate, 2020;Westgate & Wilson, 2018). To do so, people respond by regulating cognitive demands and resources, regulating goal value, or switching activities altogether. ...
... In fact, we found that the more bored people felt at the initial baseline survey, the less likely they were to participate in longitudinal follow-ups, b = À.027 (.001), p , .001, consistent with other evidence that boredom is generally bad for attrition (Westgate & Steidle, 2020). In summary, our findings contribute to a growing body of evidence that suggests there is no reliable one-to-one mapping between discrete emotions and their expression (e.g., Barrett et al., 2019;Baumeister et al., 2007), but rather that links between emotion and behavior depend heavily on contextual features of both the person and the situation. ...
... Second, very little empirical research exists on state boredom (see Westgate & Steidle, 2020; for an overview), especially outside of American and Western European contexts. A strength of the present paper is its inclusion of a very large sample of participants from across the globe, including countries not historically well-represented in psychological research (e.g., Argentina, Indonesia, and the Philippines). ...
Article
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Some public officials have expressed concern that policies mandating collective public health behaviors (e.g., national/regional “lockdown”) may result in behavioral fatigue that ultimately renders such policies ineffective. Boredom, specifically, has been singled out as one potential risk factor for noncompliance. We examined whether there was empirical evidence to support this concern during the COVID-19 pandemic in a large cross-national sample of 63,336 community respondents from 116 countries. Although boredom was higher in countries with more COVID-19 cases and in countries that instituted more stringent lockdowns, such boredom did not predict longitudinal within-person decreases in social distancing behavior (or vice versa; n = 8,031) in early spring and summer of 2020. Overall, we found little evidence that changes in boredom predict individual public health behaviors (handwashing, staying home, self-quarantining, and avoiding crowds) over time, or that such behaviors had any reliable longitudinal effects on boredom itself. In summary, contrary to concerns, we found little evidence that boredom posed a public health risk during lockdown and quarantine.
... However, little is known about the interpersonal effects of boredom (van Tilburg & Igou, 2016); in particular, the negative interpersonal consequences and correlates of boredom remain underinvestigated (for an exception, see Pfattheicher et al., 2021). Furthermore, relatively little empirical work exists on boredom in non-adult populations (e.g., Nook et al., 2017;Plummer, 2019;Westgate & Steidle, 2020;Weybright et al., 2020). Thus, the present research contributes to the literature by showing that boredom relates to sadistic tendencies in the school context and does so even among teenagers and adolescents. ...
... The literature on boredom has struggled with the question of whether boredom is beneficial or harmful, particularly in interpersonal contexts (Pfattheicher et al., 2021;Westgate & Steidle, 2020). The present research adds additional evidence that boredom may be associated with serious negative interpersonal outcomes (e.g., school bullying, sadism), even among younger age groups and in controlled institutional settings. ...
... However, this should not be taken as evidence that boredom is "bad." As previous research has emphasized (Westgate, 2020;Westgate & Steidle, 2020), boredom is not inherently good or bad, but rather acts as a signal that more meaningful engagement is needed. As such, boredom promotes both prosocial tendencies and destructive tendencies (Pfattheicher et al., 2021;Westgate & Steidle, 2020;Westgate & Wilson, 2018). ...
Article
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Schools can be a place of both love and of cruelty. We examined one type of cruelty that occurs in the school context: sadism, that is, harming others for pleasure. Primarily, we proposed and tested whether boredom plays a crucial role in the emergence of sadistic actions at school. In two well-powered studies (N = 1038; student age range = 10–18 years) using both self- and peer-reports of students' boredom levels and their sadistic tendencies, we first document that sadistic behavior occurs at school, although at a low level. We further show that those students who are more often bored at school are more likely to engage in sadistic actions (overall r = .36, 95% CI [0.24, 0.49]). In sum, the present work contributes to a better understanding of sadism in schools and points to boredom as one potential motivator. We discuss how reducing boredom might help to prevent sadistic tendencies at schools.
... However, little is known about the interpersonal effects of boredom (van Tilburg & Igou, 2016); in particular, the negative interpersonal consequences and correlates of boredom remain underinvestigated (for an exception, see Pfattheicher et al., 2021). Furthermore, relatively little empirical work exists on boredom in non-adult populations (e.g., Nook et al., 2017;Plummer, 2019;Westgate & Steidle, 2020;Weybright et al., 2020). Thus, the present research contributes to the literature by showing that boredom relates to sadistic tendencies in the school context and does so even among teenagers and adolescents. ...
... The literature on boredom has struggled with the question of whether boredom is beneficial or harmful, particularly in interpersonal contexts (Pfattheicher et al., 2021;Westgate & Steidle, 2020). The present research adds additional evidence that boredom may be associated with serious negative interpersonal outcomes (e.g., school bullying, sadism), even among younger age groups and in controlled institutional settings. ...
... However, this should not be taken as evidence that boredom is "bad." As previous research has emphasized (Westgate, 2020;Westgate & Steidle, 2020), boredom is not inherently good or bad, but rather acts as a signal that more meaningful engagement is needed. As such, boredom promotes both prosocial tendencies and destructive tendencies (Pfattheicher et al., 2021;Westgate & Steidle, 2020;Westgate & Wilson, 2018). ...
Preprint
Full-text available
Schools can be a place of both love and of cruelty. We examine one particular type of cruelty that occurs in the school context: sadism, that is, harming others for pleasure. Primarily, we propose and test whether boredom plays a crucial role in the emergence of sadistic actions at school. In two well-powered studies (total N = 1,038) using both self- and peer-reports, we first document that sadistic behavior occurs at school, although at a low level. We further show that those students who are more often bored at school are more likely to engage in sadistic actions. Overall, the present work contributes to a better understanding of sadism in schools and points to boredom as one potential motivator. We discuss implications for research on sadism and boredom, in the school context and beyond.
... While state boredom is seen as an adaptive emotion that signals situations comprising a lack of attention for and/or meaning of an activity (Toohey, 2011;Westgate & Steidle, 2020;Westgate & Wilson, 2018), we regard boredom with life as not serving this short-term informative and restorative function anymore. In that regard, conceptualizations of existential boredom that refer to longer and more severe periods of boredom are considered most relevant for boredom with life as a component of ToL (but see Gilliam, 2013). ...
... For instance, in many conceptualizations, meaninglessness is seen as a component of boredom (Barnett, 2012;Westgate & Wilson, 2018). As Westgate and Steidle (2020) note, depending on the language, boredom can refer to experiences of existential anxiety, satiation, or fatigue. Similarly, both fatigue and boredom have been described as including a lack of motivation (Goldberg et al., 2011;Trendall, 2000) and one connotation of the expression 'to fatigue' is being extremely boring (Trendall, 2000). ...
Article
A phenomenon referred to as ‘tiredness of life’ or ‘weariness of life’ appears in current discussions on the legitimacy of euthanasia for relatively healthy older adults as well as in research on suicidality more broadly. However, a consensus conceptualization of the phenomenon is lacking. In the current paper, we offer such a conceptualization by reviewing and integrating knowledge from terminology, available descriptions, and first qualitative findings. Boredom with life, aversion towards life, meaninglessness, and fatigue are identified as central components of the phenomenon. Per component, we describe how the component was identified, our definition of the component and its foundation in descriptions in the literature, and empirical studies on how the component relates to euthanasia requests and suicidality. Moreover, hypotheses on the structure of the phenomenon are outlined, such as on interactions among and the importance of the different components.
... Likewise, faculties might also be considered under-utilized if the way they are utilized is not consistent with one's preferences. In this case, one's energy would feel wasted, a feeling that is linked to boredom 30 . Taken together, boredom should not occur when the degree of function utilization is situated in the shared variance of the three ellipses. ...
... First, the boredom proneness scalethe leading measure of trait boredom -asks participants to respond to statements such as "I sit around, nothing to do", thus incorporating passivity in the definition of boredom. However, this aspect does not need to be specific to the state of boredom, and might explain the differences between trait and state boredom that are sometimes observed 30,77 . Further, it is conceivable that the response to boredom in terms of passivity, effort, or failure to sustain attention elicit different arousal pattern in the bored person, thus leading to mixed results -despite boredom being a unitary construct 37 . ...
Chapter
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Boredom poses a fascinating riddle: Although it is a ubiquitous experience, lay people and researchers often struggle with expressing what boredom actually is, and how it should be differentiated from related or opposite psychological phenomena. In this chapter, we address this riddle in two sections. First, we define boredom and its function. We propose that boredom is a state of inadequate function utilization that occurs when reward prediction error has been minimized. Boredom’s suggested evolutionary function is to drive exploration. Boredom is therefore understood to have a critical role for the effective regulation of behavior. Second, we differentiate boredom from a host of emotions and states it has frequently been likened to (or even been equated with), such as depression, amotivation, apathy, or boredom being the polar opposite of flow.
... Second, any attempt to understand the ontology, nature, and function of a psychological state on the basis of the study of its corresponding trait faces important theoretical and methodological obstacles. With respect to boredom, the theory behind trait boredom remains obscure (Tam et al., 2021a), there are known issues with the instruments meant to assess the presence of trait boredom (Gana et al., 2019;Struk et al., 2017;Vodanovich, 2003), and measures of trait boredom correlate only weakly with state boredom (Westgate & Steidle, 2020). Third, and as already announced, part of the aim of this chapter is to examine the value of boredom. ...
... Boredom can help us in our capacity as knowers. Specifically, boredom can facilitate a better understanding of our environment and enhance our self-understanding (Bortolotti & Aliffi, 2021;Elpidorou, 2014Elpidorou, , 2020Westgate & Steidle, 2020). The experience of boredom is revelatory of how we appraise a situation. ...
... Likewise, faculties might also be considered under-utilized if the way they are utilized is not consistent with one's preferences. In this case, one's energy would feel wasted, a feeling that is linked to boredom 30 . Taken together, boredom should not occur when the degree of function utilization is situated in the shared variance of the three ellipses. ...
... First, the boredom proneness scalethe leading measure of trait boredom -asks participants to respond to statements such as "I sit around, nothing to do", thus incorporating passivity in the definition of boredom. However, this aspect does not need to be specific to the state of boredom, and might explain the differences between trait and state boredom that are sometimes observed 30,77 . Further, it is conceivable that the response to boredom in terms of passivity, effort, or failure to sustain attention elicit different arousal pattern in the bored person, thus leading to mixed results -despite boredom being a unitary construct 37 . ...
Preprint
Full-text available
Boredom poses a fascinating riddle: Although it is a ubiquitous experience, lay people and researchers often struggle with expressing what boredom actually is, and how it should be differentiated from related or opposite psychological phenomena. In this chapter, we address this riddle in two parts. First, we define boredom and its function. We propose that boredom is a state of inadequate function utilization that occurs when reward prediction error has been minimized. Boredom's suggested evolutionary function is to drive exploration. Boredom is therefore understood to have a critical role for the effective regulation of behavior. Second, we differentiate boredom from a host of emotions and states it has frequently been likened to (or even been equated with), such as depression, amotivation, apathy or boredom being the polar opposite of flow.
... Is it causal? Much of the above research is correlational, or reflects differences in boredom-proneness or trait boredom (which might be explained by confounds or third variables; see Westgate & Steidle, 2020). However, experimental studies suggest that boredom plays a causal role in many of these outcomes. ...
... In the Western world, "bore" [1768], the predecessor of boredom, referred to the act of being "tiresome or dull"; boredom appeared as early as the 1760s as an English expression to describe the supposedly "French" experience of having a dull time (Westgate & Steidle, 2020). This does not mean that people in the past did not feel bored; for instance, boredom appears in ancient Chinese poetry, largely in the context of leisure boredom. ...
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Why do people experience unpleasant, aversive emotions? Boredom is associated with a wide range of mental and physical health problems, including binge eating, substance use, anxiety, and depression. Nor does boredom feel good; many people are willing to shock themselves or even view upsetting images rather than be bored. Given such evidence, is it possible that boredom has adaptive value? We argue that it does; boredom provides an important evolutionary solution to minimizing prediction error by incentivizing learning. Reducing prediction error, it has been argued, is a core organizing principle underlying cognition; however, one way to reduce error is to isolate one’s self in extremely predictable environments (i.e., the “Dark Room Problem”). We argue that boredom evolved, at least in part, to prevent this. Specifically, boredom makes such a solution affectively undesirable, by aversively signaling a lack of successful attentional engagement in a valued goal-congruent activity. To reduce this aversive state, people are motivated to re-engage in meaningful activities and reallocate attentional resources. We review evidence from behavioral science and computational modeling supporting the role of boredom in maximizing learning and reducing prediction error. Furthermore, we suggest that these functions of boredom are not only present in modern humans, but have been conserved across species. We review evidence for boredom-like states in non-human animals and argue that animals likely experience boredom due to sharing many of the same psychological and physiological components of emotion as humans. For instance, animals in under-stimulated environments, such as cages or zoos, exhibit stereotyped behavior and other responses analogous to boredom in humans, including novelty seeking and play. In doing so, we address the adaptive value of boredom and its origins and prevalence in both human and non-human animals.
... Does a deviation from an optimal cognitive set-point similarly have negative consequences that demand action? There is ample evidence that it does in terms of the raft of maladaptive behavioral and affective consequences that befall those in a bored state or the highly boredom prone 37 . ...
... Boredom was selected because it reflects a perceived lack of attentional engagement with one's surroundings (Westgate & Steidle, 2020). This, coupled with research showing that attending to nature (i.e., noticing; Passmore & Holder, 2017) is one of the primary predictors of nature connectedness, suggested that boredom might have an impact on nature connectedness. ...
Article
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Many of the psychological phenomena that are relevant to the environmental crises facing the globe are determined by a complex set of interrelated constructs—that is, they are determined by a network of factors. In recognizing that these factors form a network and do not work in isolation, the need for research that captures the holistic interrelations between variables becomes obvious. As a way of exploring the value of such an approach for other areas of environmental psychology, we tested the utility of treating nature-connectedness experiences as a network using principles adapted from social network analysis. In Study 1, we look at the affective situation network concerning nature-connectedness experiences. In Study 2, we draw upon the pathways to nature framework to investigate the activity situation network for nature connectedness experiences. In Study 1, we find that awe, inspiration, and love are all important and central to nature-connectedness experiences. In Study 2, we find that meaningful (e.g., meaning-making) and deliberate engagement (e.g., noticing) are important and central to nature-connectedness experiences. More importantly, the results from this pair of studies indicate that using this network approach is a useful exploratory tool that is both generative and flexible and can yield important insights that can catalyse novel lines of confirmatory research. Thus, we suggest that research in other areas of environmental psychology consider this approach.
... Boredom, defined as a failure to engage one's attention in a task despite a desire to do so Eastwood et al., 2012), and boredom proneness, a tendency to experience state boredom more frequently and intensely (Tam et al., 2021), are common human experiences that recent research suggests is on the rise (Weybright et al., 2020). Perhaps due to the ubiquity of boredom and the negative consequences associated with both trait and state boredom, ranging from elevated rates of depression and anxiety to issues with drug and alcohol use (see Danckert, Mugon, et al., 2018, for review), research on the subject has exploded in the past decade (Westgate & Steidle, 2020). Despite the fact that boredom is clearly an ongoing concern, it appears to have gone under the radar of large-scale endeavors intended to track mental well-being. ...
... This article examines and synthesizes these studies from a social psychological viewpoint, framing boredom as an emotion that signals the necessity for change to reestablish effective focus in meaningful tasks. By exploring the implications of this perspective on understanding boredom across different cultures and species, we also highlight potential strategies for specific interventions aimed at alleviating boredom and enhancing overall well-being [2]. Conducted three studies involving 473 undergraduate participants to investigate the causes and accompanying factors of interpersonal boredom. ...
Conference Paper
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Undoubtedly, one of the most important social issues is the discussion of boredom and disillusionment, which is currently observable in many societies, and perhaps many individuals, as well as our loved ones, have encountered it and are seeking treatment to be relieved of it and resolve the crisis. The issue of boredom is a perennial topic that has always been on the list of fundamental human crises from the past to the present, and perhaps in the future as well. This work examines the meaning and concept of boredom, as well as its effects, reasons, treatments, and outcomes. Five articles that have provided accurate insights into explaining and defining the issue have been reviewed, and important questions have been answered that may have occupied individuals' minds for a long time.
... The phenomenology of boredom has been characterised by feelings of restlessness, lethargy, lack of concentration, and distorted time perception (Martin et al., 2006). A review study has highlighted that boredom is related to an inability to sustain attentional capacities (Westgate & Steidle, 2020). It may therefore be related to the construct of mental effort. ...
Preprint
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Breathwork is a term for an understudied school of practices that involve the intentional modulation of respiration to induce an altered state of consciousness (ASC). We map here the neural dynamics of mental content during breathwork, using a neurophenomenological approach by combining Temporal Experience Tracing, a quantitative phenomenological methodology that preserves the temporal dynamics of subjective experience, with low-density portable EEG devices for every session. Fourteen novice participants completed a series of up to 28 breathwork sessions - of 20, 40 or 60 minutes - in 28 days, yielding a neurophenomenological dataset of 301 breathwork sessions. Using hypothesis-driven and data-driven approaches, we found that positive ‘psychedelic-like’ subjective experiences that occurred within the breathwork sessions were associated with increased neural Lempel-Ziv complexity. Further, exploratory analyses showed that the aperiodic exponent of the power spectral density (PSD) - but not oscillatory alpha power - was also associated with these psychedelic-like phenomenological substates. We demonstrate the strength of this neurophenomenological framework, maximising the concurrent data acquisition of brain activity and phenomenological dynamics in multiple experiential dimensions. Non-linear aspects of brain dynamics, like complexity and the aperiodic exponent of the PSD, neurally map both a data-driven complex composite of positive experiences, and hypothesis-driven aspects of psychedelic-like experience states such as high bliss.
... Crucially, boredom matters. Theoretical and empirical work has shown that boredom is an aversive sensation (Westgate and Steidle, 2020) that acts as an internal signal to change one's ongoing course of action (Wolff and Martarelli, 2020). More specifically, functional accounts of boredom propose that boredom triggers exploration (i.e., it orients our attention off task) and thereby assume that boredom has a key role in navigating the trade-off between exploration and exploitation (Danckert, 2019;. ...
Article
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Behavioral researchers tend to study behavior in highly controlled laboratory settings to minimize the effects of potential confounders. Yet, while doing so, the artificial setup itself might unintentionally introduce noise or confounders, such as boredom. In this perspective, we draw upon theoretical and empirical evidence to make the case that (a) some experimental setups are likely to induce boredom in participants, (b) the degree of boredom induced might differ between individuals as a function of differences in trait boredom, (c) boredom can impair participants’ attention, can make study participation more effortful, and can increase the urge to do something else (i.e., to disengage from the study). Most importantly, we argue that some participants might adjust their behavior because they are bored. Considering boredom’s potential for adding noise to data, or for being an unwanted confound, we discuss a set of recommendations on how to control for and deal with the occurrence and effects of boredom in behavioral science research.
... Boredom has also been gaining attention in various psychological disciplines. As an emotion it can be construed as the engagement in meaningful activities [52], and, generally, it is the outcome of a failed attempt to interact with one's environment; consequently, such dissatisfaction results in emotional stress [53]. It is an unpleasant feeling created by conditions involving a perceived lack of purpose, excitement, and ambition, such as sadness, and the lack of a sense of a purposeful life [43]. ...
Article
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In recent years, users’ privacy concerns and reluctance to use have posed a challenge for the social media and wellbeing of its users. There is a paucity of research on elderly users’ negative connotations of social media and the way these connotations contribute to developing passive behaviour towards social media use, which, in turn, affects subjective wellbeing. To address this research vacuum we employed the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) approach to describe the evolution of passive social media use behaviour from the perspective of communication overload, complexity, and privacy. We conceptualized subjective wellbeing as a combination of three components–negative feelings, positive feelings, and life satisfaction. Negative and positive feelings were used to derive an overall affect balance score that fluctuates between ‘unhappiest possible’ and ‘happiest possible’. The proposed research framework was empirically validated through 399 valid responses from elderly social media users. Our findings reveal that communication overload and complexity raise privacy concerns among social media users, which leads to passive usage of social media. This passive social media use improved the subjective wellbeing favourably by lowering negative feelings and raising positive feelings and life satisfaction. The findings also revealed that respondents’ overall affect balance leans towards positive feelings as a consequence of passive social media use. This study contributes to the field of technostress by illuminating how the SSO perspective aid the comprehension of the way passive social media use influences the subjective wellbeing of its users.
... Factors like an unattractive environment or a monotonous task could influence participant feelings of anxiety and fatigue [32]. Boredom resulting from extended, repetitive tasks, such as the one used here (four series with 75 trials each), also contributes to fatigue and can alter thoughts, emotions, and behaviors [33,34]. Interestingly, comfort levels did not impact this evaluation. ...
Article
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Recent technological advances have paved the way for incorporating virtual reality (VR) into attentional bias modification training (ABMT) for the treatment of eating disorders. An important consideration in this therapeutic approach is ensuring the ease and comfort of users of the hardware and software, preventing them from becoming additional obstacles during treatment. To assess this, 68 healthy participants engaged in an ABMT experiment aimed at evaluating various factors, including usability as well as the participants’ comfort while using the VR equipment, task-induced fatigue, and attitudes towards the technology. Our results indicated a favorable usability level for the ABMT proposed in this study. While their discomfort, anxiety, and fatigue increased during the task, these did not significantly impact its execution. However, heightened anxiety and fatigue were linked to lower evaluations of software usability. Other variables considered in the experiment did not notably affect the task.
... This is a hypothesis worth pursuing. Arguably, men may get more bored than women even under normal conditions (Gosline, 2007;Talbot, 2020;Westgate and Steidle, 2020). The effects of domestic boredom could turn out to be unremarkable, compared with the intense stresses of joblessness, poverty, and a bleak future. ...
Article
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Human beings are dynamic; our innate faculties beg to engage in activities. To achieve fullness and human dignity, people “convert” personal capabilities into active “functionings,” Amartya Sen explains. This means that staying still is not a normal state. It can feel like punishment. Forced inactivity will generate resentment, resistance, and boredom that can fester until pent-up energy explodes violently, or implodes in depression. Boredom defaults on capabilities and resources in many cases. In other cases, stillness is a gift. It can stimulate the imagination to fill in emptiness with memories and new explorations. Either boredom builds toward doing damage, or it releases energy to think and to create. What people don't do is stay put, mentally or physically. Authorities-including police, judges, teachers, parents –should take this dynamic human condition into account and reconsider the effects of conventional command and control policies. Then they can choose between violence and creativity as alternative outlets for the energy that boredom generates. Short of facing up to human dynamism, decision-making may continue to favor strong-arm tactics, which trigger the violence and pain that policing is meant to mitigate. Is it surprising that apparently peaceful peoplebecome enraged in lockdown conditions? Do adults wonder why students drop-out of school and suffer escalating rates of depression and suicide? Boredom is certainly not the only cause for these disastrous effects, but to ignore it risks remaining complicit with processes that perpetuate personal and collective dysfunctions. Complicity with harmful practices will miss opportunities to channel frustrated energy toward developing human capabilities. Authorities are responsible for promoting peaceful development. We are all responsible.[2] Normally, people stay busy with routine activities. We work, play, attend to family and to friends. Particular activities have even become our public badges of identity, as is evident in surnames (Cooper, Baker, Taylor, Farmer, etc.) that trace back to work that ancestors answered to. Lockdown during COVID-19 meant that many otherwise occupied people had few outlets for energy. Those who knew how to meditate managed to assuage anxiety through contemplation and the pursuit of ideal emptiness.
... In this regard, Eastwood et al. (2012) conceptualized that disengagement is a key factor in the experience of boredom. Despite the diverse perspectives and viewpoints on this phenomenon (Elpidorou, 2014;Vodanovich & Watt, 2016;Westgate & Steidle, 2020), it seems there is one thing scholars agree on, which is that the boredom is a complex phenomenon (Caldwell, et al., 1999;Raffaelli et al., 2018). ...
Article
Background and Objectives Anecdotal evidence and references to boredom appear frequently in mass media, but only a few studies directly examine the phenomenon of boredom, and existing literature within the context of leisure has primarily focused on adolescents. Social isolation and loneliness often intertwine with boredom, and chronic conditions are major factors that increase the risk of experiencing boredom in later life. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the significance of boredom among older adults and assess the existing literature to gain a more holistic understanding of boredom and how it has been studied among older adults in the context of leisure. Research Design and Methods Following the PRISMA guidelines, this study gathered literature from five electronic databases through December 2022. This systematic review investigated both qualitative and quantitative evidence, and standardized data extraction and study quality assessments were conducted. Results A comprehensive search initially revealed 2,757 potentially relevant articles, eight of which met the full inclusion criteria. Three studies investigated the phenomenon of leisure-boredom, and five studies assessed the experience of boredom in general and its relationship with leisure engagement. A majority of the studies, especially ones that examined older adults’ experience of overall boredom experience lacked a thorough description of the phenomenon and did not use reliable and/or valid measurements. Discussion and Implications Findings from eight articles offer insights into boredom, however, the discussion examines the limitations of these studies and reasons why studying boredom is important. We also speculate as to why little research has addressed leisure boredom among older adults and propose a research agenda for increasing our understanding of the ways older adults experience boredom, the effects boredom has on health and well-being, and how boredom can be alleviated and/or managed in the context of leisure.
... Crucially, boredom matters. Theoretical and empirical work has shown that boredom is an aversive sensation (Westgate & Steidle, 2020) that acts as an internal signal to change one's ongoing course of action (Wolff & Martarelli, 2020). More specifically, functional accounts of boredom propose that boredom triggers exploration (i.e., it orients our attention off task) and thereby assumes a key role in navigating the trade-off between exploration and exploitation Danckert, 2019). ...
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Behavioral researchers tend to study behaviour in highly controlled laboratory settings to minimize effects of potential confounders. Yet, while doing so, the artificial setup itself might unintentionally introduce noise or confounders, such as boredom. In this perspective, we draw upon theoretical and empirical evidence to make the case that a) some experimental setups are likely to induce boredom in participants, b) the degree of boredom induced might differ between individuals as a function of differences in trait boredom, c) boredom can impair participants’ attention, can make study participation more effortful, and can increase the urge to do something else (i.e., to disengage from the study). Most importantly, we argue that some participants might adjust their behaviour because they are bored. Considering boredom’s potential for adding noise to data, or for being an unwanted confound, we discuss a set of recommendations on how to control for, and deal with the occurrence and effects of boredom in behavioral science research.
... Therefore, we cannot conclude purely from these results that boredom is not driving mood drift. Future work might instead ask participants to directly report their boredom 69 , enabling more frequent assessment of boredom as an emotion 70 . ...
... Boredom is defined here as the opposite of excitement (cf. Russell, 1980), namely as a low arousal and negatively valenced emotion, which is evoked by lack of attentional engagement in meaningful activities (Westgate & Steidle, 2020) or by low complexity (Mikulas & Vodanovich, 1993). ...
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Customers have since long received service from various machines, and this development is expected to accelerate when AI‐powered synthetic agents—such as chatbots and embodied service robots—become more common. Existing research on customers' interactions with service machines is typically focused on perceptions of machine attributes when the machine is busy. However, many machines are idle for a considerable time (i.e., they are not used), and little is known about consumer perceptions of machine idleness—despite the fact that idle machine behavior can contribute to the user experience, too. In the present study, it is assumed that (a) idleness and busyness represent differently valenced states in a human‐to‐human context (i.e., idleness is more negatively charged than busyness for most humans). It is also assumed that (b) anthropomorphism can occur in relation to a service machine, and that (c) beliefs about idleness and busyness from a human‐to‐human context can carry over and inform views of machines' minds. Three experiments were conducted to explore these assumptions, and they show that an idle service machine is attributed less positively charged mind states than a busy service machine. The results also show that such attribution activities affect the overall evaluation of the service machine.
... Therefore, we cannot conclude purely from these results that boredom is not driving mood drift. Future work might instead ask participants to directly report their boredom 69 , enabling more frequent assessment of boredom as an emotion 70 . ...
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Does our mood change as time passes? This question is central to behavioural and affective science, yet it remains largely unexamined. To investigate, we intermixed subjective momentary mood ratings into repetitive psychology paradigms. Here we demonstrate that task and rest periods lowered participants’ mood, an effect we call ‘Mood Drift Over Time’. This finding was replicated in 19 cohorts totalling 28,482 adult and adolescent participants. The drift was relatively large (−13.8% after 7.3 min of rest, Cohen’s d = 0.574) and was consistent across cohorts. Behaviour was also impacted: participants were less likely to gamble in a task that followed a rest period. Importantly, the drift slope was inversely related to reward sensitivity. We show that accounting for time using a linear term significantly improves the fit of a computational model of mood. Our work provides conceptual and methodological reasons for researchers to account for time’s effects when studying mood and behaviour.
... Understanding how specific emotions are manifested in non-human animals can be problematic without the self-reporting measures available in the study of human emotion because how emotions are experienced are private to the individual (e.g., [30,31]). The study of animal boredom has additional challenges, with animals in boredom-like states exhibiting both high arousal (e.g., restlessness) and low arousal (e.g., lethargy) behaviours (see [1,32]). Measuring boredom is further complicated by potential behavioural indicators also occurring with other affective states, such as 'inactivity' with depression, apathy, or relaxation [33]. ...
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Boredom is a potential chronic but overlooked animal welfare problem. Caused by monotony, sub-optimal stimulation, and restrictive housing, boredom can therefore affect companion animals, particularly those traditionally caged, such as ferrets. We surveyed owners' (n = 621) perceptions of ferrets' capacity to experience boredom, behaviours they associate with it, and whether their perception of their ferrets' capacity for boredom influenced training techniques, housing, and environmental enrichment (EE). Most (93.0%) owners believed that ferrets could experience boredom, but owners who doubted that ferrets experience boredom (7.0%) provided slightly but significantly fewer EE types to their ferrets. Heat map and classification tree analysis showed that owners identified scratching at enclosure walls (n = 420) and excessive sleeping (n = 312) as distinctive behavioural indicators of ferret boredom. Repetitive pacing (n = 381), yawning (n = 191), and resting with eyes open (n = 171) were also suggested to indicate ferret boredom, but these overlapped with other states. Finally, ferret owners suggested social housing, tactile interaction with humans, and exploration as most important for preventing boredom. These results suggest that pet ferrets are at risk of reduced welfare from owners who doubt they can experience boredom, highlighting an opportunity to improve welfare through information dissemination. We recommend further investigation into ferret boredom capacity, behavioural indicators, and mitigation strategies.
... Boredom is an emotion and a common problem experienced daily (Eastwood et al., 2012). However, its influential role in signaling the need for change and its power in steering human behavior towards engagement and enjoyable activities have been largely overlooked (Westgate & Steidle, 2020). Boredom seeking stimulation in negative behaviors such as problematic Internet use (PIU) (Lin et al., 2009;Pempek et al., 2009;Skues et al., 2015). ...
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The COVID-19 pandemic has been linked to increased psychological distress. To cope with this distress and boredom, individuals spend more time on the internet, especially university students who are at a greater risk for problematic Internet use (PIU). Therefore, this study investigates the relationship between boredom, distress tolerance, and problematic internet use. This study employed a qualitative approach using a survey. A self-administered questionnaire was designed to collect data. This study involved 363 participants among public university students. Three instruments used to measure the research variables are the Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS), Distress Tolerance Scale (DTS), and the Problematic Internet Use Questionnaire (PIUQ). Descriptive analysis and Pearson Correlation tests were conducted using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS). The findings showed that boredom is significantly correlated with problematic internet use. However, there was no significant correlation between distress tolerance and problematic internet use.
... In a capitalistic society that worships constant growth, acceleration, and efficiency, boredom is consequentially framed as a state of "having nothing to do" and considered to be a problem instead of being addressed as an issue of meaninglessness. Thus, how and where we draw boundaries between emotions ("this is boredom" vs. "this is relaxation") depends on culturally predefined concepts of emotions instead of being an innate physiological process [18,52]. In addition, in social constructivism, there is a strong emphasis on how society influences (constructs) our interpretations and emotions. ...
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Boredom has been identified as one of the greatest psychological challenges when staying at home during quarantine and isolation. However, this does not mean that the situation necessarily causes boredom. On the basis of 13 explorative interviews with bored and non-bored persons who have been under quarantine or in isolation, we explain why boredom is related to a subjective interpretation process rather than being a direct consequence of the objective situation. Specifically, we show that participants vary significantly in their interpretations of staying at home and, thus, also in their experience of boredom. While the non-bored participants interpret the situation as a relief or as irrelevant, the bored participants interpret it as a major restriction that only some are able to cope with.
... A final limitation is that we collected data from US MTurk participants, thus results cannot be generalized to other cultures and countries. Socio-cultural variables such as inequalities in access to resources, economic disadvantage, and different rates/ responses to COVID-19 across countries are likely to affect the constructs under investigation here (Westgate and Steidle, 2020;Van Bavel et al., 2020). ...
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In an effort to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries around the world have employed non-pharmaceutical containment measures. The effectiveness of such miti-gation efforts relies on individual compliance (e.g., avoiding to travel or to gather). Crucially, adhering to the required behavioral recommendations places substantial burdens on those who are asked to follow them. One particularly likely outcome of adherence should be the experience of boredom. Thus, people might get bored by bothering. Drawing from research and theorizing on reward-based decision making, we conducted a high-powered study (N = 1553 US participants) to investigate whether the value and effort people ascribe to adherence to containment measures directly and indirectly (i.e., mediated by adherence) affects their experience of boredom. As expected, structural equation modeling revealed that high value and low effort predicted compliance with behavioral recommendations. Moreover, higher compliance was linked to more boredom, meaning that high value and low effort increased boredom via compliance. In contrast, high value and low effort had direct effects on boredom in the opposite direction (i.e., decreasing boredom). Attesting to their robustness and generalizability, these findings held for both prospective (with respect to upcoming winter holidays) and retrospective behavior (with respect to previous thanksgiving holidays), across US states, which had or had not enforced behavioral restrictions, individual differences in boredom proneness, and demographic variables. Taken together, our results provide evidence that people can indeed get bored by bothering: Complying with nonpharmacological containment measures like avoiding to travel and to gather can come at the cost of getting bored, an experience that was strongly linked to negative affect in our study.
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Breathwork is an understudied school of practices involving intentional respiratory modulation to induce an altered state of consciousness (ASC). We simultaneously investigate the phenomenological and neural dynamics of breathwork by combining Temporal Experience Tracing, a quantitative methodology that preserves the temporal dynamics of subjective experience, with low-density portable EEG devices. Fourteen novice participants completed a course of up to 28 breathwork sessions—of 20, 40, or 60 min—in 28 days, yielding a neurophenomenological dataset of 301 breathwork sessions. Using hypothesis-driven and data-driven approaches, we found that “psychedelic-like” subjective experiences were associated with increased neural Lempel-Ziv complexity during breathwork. Exploratory analyses showed that the aperiodic exponent of the power spectral density—but not oscillatory alpha power—yielded similar neurophenomenological associations. Non-linear neural features, like complexity and the aperiodic exponent, neurally map both a multidimensional data-driven composite of positive experiences, and hypothesis-driven aspects of psychedelic-like experience states such as high bliss.
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The sitcom “The Good Place” tells the story of an imaginary afterlife where everyone in heaven is in an unhappy state (ironically called the “good” place). All the fun things they can do in eternity to the point that everyone gets bored and eventually the meaning in their lives disappears. Seeing death as the source of meaning in life on earth, the solution in this story is to bring death back to heaven. The view that eternity will lead to boredom is based on Bernard Williams’ Necessary Boredom Thesis. Williams argues that when humans do not experience death (immortality), there is a meaning in life that will be lost. The author sees that this view raises questions in two important respects: First, how do believers view the perspective of death as the source of life’s meaning? Second, what is the believer’s perspective on immortality and boredom in the new heaven and new earth—in other words, is immortality something bad and not to be coveted? This paper first examines the philosophical assumptions behind the Necessary Boredom Thesis and shows that compared to the Christian worldview, this thesis does not see human beings holistically, thus making life only partially construed. Secondly, this paper evaluates this thesis with the biblical concept of identity and the new heaven and earth, so that eternity can be interpreted without boredom because we have a relationship with God.
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Background: Previous research has shown that mindfulness is associated with slower passage of time in everyday life, and with lower self-reported time pressure. This study investigates some of the potential mechanisms behind these relationships. Methods: 318 participants submitted their responses to an online survey which collected data regarding passage of time judgments, time pressure, trait mindfulness, temperament, task load, and metacognitions about time. Using commonality and dominance analyses, we explored how these variables contributed, either alone or jointly, to predicting how fast (or slow) time seems to pass for participants, or how pressed for time they felt. Results: Mindfulness and temperament had some overlaps in their ability to predict passage of time judgments and time pressure for durations at the month and 2-month scales. The temperamental trait of extraversion/surgency, as well as the Non-judging and Non-reacting facets of mindfulness were among the best predictors of passage of time judgments and time pressure. Attention-related variables were mainly related to time perception via their involvement in joint effects with other variables. Results also suggested that metacognitions about time interacted with other variables in predicting passage of time judgments, but only at the month scale. Finally, among all the variables included in this study, task load had the highest degree of involvement in predictions of self-reported time pressure at the week and month scales, but it contributed relatively little to predicting passage of time judgments. Conclusions: Results suggest that mindfulness relates to passage of time through its involvement in inferential processes. The data also shows how different factors are related to PoTJ at different time scales. Finally, results suggest the existence of both similarities and differences in how passage of time and time pressure relate to the other included variables. Keywords Mindfulness; Temperament; Metacognition; Task load; Psychological time; Time perception; Passage of time judgments; Time pressure
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Assumptions around the association between boredom and creativity are contentious. Although studies suggest positive effects of boredom, it is also considered a negative predictor of creativity. Researchers also assume that creativity reduces boredom, but boredom can also occur during creative tasks. In this review, we identify and systematise the empirical evidence available to date on the association between creativity and boredom in educational contexts. The string‐guided electronic search yielded 2849 publications. Nineteen publications based on 27 empirical studies met the inclusion criteria. Two reviewers extracted definitions, theories, methods, operationalisations, measurement instruments, and outcomes from the studies using a coding scheme. We identified a range of different theoretical and methodological approaches. The largest cache of empirical evidence was obtained from experimental and quasi‐experimental studies (five positive associations, four negative, two contradictory, and three insignificant results). Correlation studies identified three negative, one contradictory, and seven insignificant correlations between boredom and creativity. In addition, two studies with exploratory, statistically not relevant results contributed to the body of research. The results from the identified and evaluated studies argue both for and against the sensitivity of creative processes in relation to boredom—but a clear causal, positive or negative effect of boredom on creativity is not currently supported by the empirical evidence available. Previous research has also not yet demonstrated an apparent effect of creative states or traits on academic boredom. Future research should aim to explore under what circumstances different relationships between boredom and creativity can be observed and reliably replicated.
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I identify and then aim to resolve a tension between the psychological and existential conceptions of boredom. The dominant view in psychology is that boredom is an emotional state that is adaptive and self-regulatory. In contrast, in the philosophical phenomenological tradition, boredom is often considered as an existentially important mood. I leverage the predictive processing framework to offer an integrative account of boredom that allows us to resolve these tensions. This account explains the functional aspects of boredom-as-emotion in the psychological literature, offering a principled way of defining boredom’s function in terms of prediction-error-minimisation. However, mediated through predictive processing, we can also integrate the phenomenological view of boredom as a mood; in this light, boredom tracks our grip on the world – revealing a potentially fundamental (mis)attunement.
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Boredom has been characterized as a crisis of meaning, a failure of attention, and a call to action. Yet as a self-regulatory signal writ-large, we are still left with the question of what makes any given boredom episode meaningless, disengaging, or a prompt to act. We propose that boredom is an affective signal that we have deviated from an optimal ('Goldilocks') zone of cognitive engagement. Such deviations may be due to a perceived lack of meaning, arise as a consequence of struggles we are experiencing in attending to a task, or be interpreted as a blunt call to find something different to engage with. Thus, the key to understanding boredom lies in its role in keeping us cognitively engaged.
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Research supports the essential nature of play as directly impactful of children's overall development and wellbeing. However, the meaning of play, play materials, and access to play are not uniform across cultures or communities. Biopsychosocial factors such as development, health, mental health, trauma, racism, gender, gender identity, family structure, socioeconomics, geography, and religion influence how and why children play within their daily lives. Children in healthcare settings can face additional obstacles to play engagement thereby minimizing the therapeutic and healing impact of play. This chapter seeks to highlight the need for healthcare providers, particularly play specialists, to improve their understanding of biopsychosocial factors to promote more thorough assessments of patient coping, facilitate beneficial play engagements, and address areas of intrinsic bias in pursuit of optimal outcomes and well-being for children in healthcare settings whether hospitals, community clinics, hospice, or residential care.
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Four experiments tested the hypothesis that meeting someone new who is boring would result in people feeling superior to the boring individual, which would then result in people viewing themselves as better than others and increased confidence. Respondents reported greater feelings of superiority, meaninglessness, and difficulty paying attention when they wrote about meeting a new, boring individual than a new or manipulative individual. Feeling superior, but not meaninglessness and attention, mediated the effect of interpersonal boredom on viewing oneself as better than others, but not on confidence. These finding did not occur when people wrote about a boring task or a disliked, manipulative individual. The experiments elucidate how interpersonal boredom, albeit a negative experience, can enhance people’s sense of self.
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Se presentan las características básicas del modelo MAC (Meaning and AttentionalComponents) sobre el aburrimiento según Westgate (2018), su utilidad para la labor del psicólogo, enfatizándose la posibilidad de aplicarlo a cualquier contexto. Asimismo se presenta la fundamentación teórica e investigación básica y sus vínculos con algunos enfoques e intervenciones de otras áreas de la psicología, completándose con algunas propuestas sobre futuras investigaciones que se pueden propiciar teniendo como referente el modelo. Finalmente, se analiza una reacción colectiva de ciudadanos como expresión pública de protesta. The basic characteristics of the MAC (Meaning and Attentional Components) model about boredom according to Westgate (2018) are presented. Its usefulness for the work of the psychologist. The possibility to apply it to any context. What is its theoretical foundation and basic research. Its links with some approaches and interventions in other areas of psychology. What future research can be facilitated with the model as a reference. Finally, it is used to analyze a collective reaction of citizens as a public expression of protest.
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We all experience boredom, from being stuck in airport security lines to reading poorly written book chapters. But what is boredom, why do we experience it, and what happens when we do? We suggest a new take on this everyday emotional experience, as an important and potentially useful cue that we’re not cognitively engaged in meaningful experiences. According to the Meaning and Attentional Components (MAC) model of boredom, people feel bored when they can’t successfully engage their attention in meaningful activities. Boredom can be painful, but it gives us important feedback about our lives, by signaling a lack of meaningful attentional engagement. In short, boredom tells us whether we want to and are able to focus on what we are doing or thinking, and steers us towards behaviors that ensure that we do. Across a broad range of situations, attention and meaning independently predict boredom, are not highly correlated, and do not interact. But more importantly, attention and meaning deficits result in different types of boredom with different downstream consequences for how people behave. For instance, being bored because what you’re doing lacks meaning feels different and has different consequences than being bored because you can’t pay attention, in part because they signal different problems. Likewise, boredom can result when something is too easy or too hard, because both make it hard to pay attention. All of these different causes of boredom matter, we argue, because they result in different types of boredom with different downstream consequences. Why we are bored shapes what we want to do next, and helps explain why bored people make often puzzling decisions, such as choosing to self-administer painful electric shocks or turning to political extremism. In short, like pain, boredom may be unpleasant but it plays an important role in alerting us when we either don’t want to (or are unable to) pay attention to what we’re doing, and motivating us to change our behavior to restore attention and meaning to our lives, for good or for ill.
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Yucel, M. & Westgate, E. C. (Accepted). From electric shocks to the electoral college: How boredom steers moral behavior. In A. Elpidorou (Ed.), The Moral Psychology of Boredom. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
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What gives rise to sadism? While sadistic behavior (i.e., harming others for pleasure) is well-documented, past empirical research is nearly silent regarding the psychological factors behind it. We help close this gap by suggesting that boredom plays a crucial role in the emergence of sadistic tendencies. Across nine diverse studies, we provide correlational and experimental evidence for a link between boredom and sadism. We demonstrate that sadistic tendencies are more pronounced among people who report chronic proneness to boredom in everyday life (Studies 1A-1F, N = 1780). We then document that this relationship generalizes across a variety of important societal contexts, including online trolling; sadism in the military; sadistic behavior among parents; and sadistic fantasies (Studies 2-5, N = 1740). Finally, we manipulate boredom experimentally and show that inducing boredom increases sadistic behavior (i.e., killing worms; destroying other participants’ pay; Studies 6-9, N = 4097). However, alternatives matter: When several behavioral alternatives are available, boredom only motivates sadistic behavior among individuals with high dispositional sadism (Study 7). Conversely, when there is no alternative, boredom increases sadistic behavior across the board, even among individuals low in dispositional sadism (Studies 8 & 9). We further show that excitement and novelty seeking mediate the effects of boredom, and that boredom not only promotes sadistic (proactive) aggression, but reactive aggression as well (Study 9). Overall, the present work contributes to a better understanding of sadism and highlights the destructive potential of boredom. We discuss implications for basic research on sadism and boredom, as well as applied implications for society at large.
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During the past two decades, self-control research has been dominated by the strength model of self-control, which is built on the premise that the capacity for self-control is a limited global resource that can become temporarily depleted, resulting in a state called ego depletion. The foundations of ego depletion have recently been questioned. Thus, although self-control is among the most researched psychological concepts with high societal relevance, an inconsistent body of literature limits our understanding of how self-control operates. Here, we propose that the inconsistencies are partly due to a confound that has unknowingly and systematically been introduced into the ego-depletion research: boredom. We propose that boredom might affect results of self-control research by placing an unwanted demand on self-control and signaling that one should explore behavioral alternatives. To account for boredom in self-controlled behavior, we provide a working model that integrates evidence from reward-based models of self-control and recent theorizing on boredom to explain the effects of both self-control exertion and boredom on subsequent self-control performance. We propose that task-induced boredom should be systematically monitored in self-control research to assess the validity of the ego-depletion effect.
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Ego depletion effects are usually examined in a sequential task paradigm in which exerting mental effort in a first task is thought to affect performance on a subsequent self-control task. A so-called ego depletion effect is observed if performance on the second task is impaired for the high demand relative to the low demand group. The present studies take a different approach. Instead of measuring performance in the second task that is equally difficult for all participants, the present studies investigated effects of effortful exertion on the choice to willingly exert effort on a subsequent task. Three pre-registered studies investigated if participants select less effort demanding math problems for upcoming tasks compared to a control group after exerting mental effort in an initial task. Results were mixed. Study 1 (N = 86) revealed no significant effect of mental effort exertion on mean choice difficulty. In Study 2 (N = 269), the expected effect emerged in an exploratory analysis when controlling for math self-assessment, which was robustly associated with the choice measure. Study 3 (N = 330) descriptively, albeit non-significantly replicated this result. An internal random-effects meta-analysis revealed a small overall effect of g = 0.18 when accounting for math self-assessment, albeit with large heterogeneity. Exploratory analyses point to the importance of the subjective experience of mental effort in effort-selection paradigms. We discuss the implications of the small overall effect size for future research and the possibility to examine effort choice in everyday life.
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For many, there is little more rewarding than the feeling of curling up with a good book, wandering a famous art gallery, or listening to a favorite musician perform live in front of an audience. But do the arts, music, and literature actually make our lives happier, richer, and more meaningful? We suggest they do. In this chapter, we review empirical evidence for the psychological benefits of the humanities, including art, music, and literature, and find that across a wide variety of samples, exposure and engagement is consistently linked to greater well-being. In particular, we suggest that the humanities may increase well-being directly by providing people with enjoyable, rich, and meaningful experiences, as well as indirectly by fostering skills and abilities that contribute to psychological well-being in the long-term. These approaches map onto two mechanisms: 1) direct affective benefits that create enjoyable, rich, and interesting experiences, and 2) indirect cognitive benefits, including social abilities and motivations that promote subjective well-being via interpersonal connection and self- and emotion-regulation. Art, music, and literature may not only provide temporary nourishment for a good life, but teach people lasting skills they can capitalize on to increase long-term well-being.
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People feel tired or depleted after exerting mental effort. But even preregistered studies often fail to find effects of exerting effort on behavioral performance in the laboratory or elucidate the underlying psychology. We tested a new paradigm in four preregistered within-subjects studies (N = 686). An initial high-demand task reliably elicited very strong effort phenomenology compared with a low-demand task. Afterward, participants completed a Stroop task. We used drift-diffusion modeling to obtain the boundary (response caution) and drift-rate (information-processing speed) parameters. Bayesian analyses indicated that the high-demand manipulation reduced boundary but not drift rate. Increased effort sensations further predicted reduced boundary. However, our demand manipulation did not affect subsequent inhibition, as assessed with traditional Stroop behavioral measures and additional diffusion-model analyses for conflict tasks. Thus, effort exertion reduced response caution rather than inhibitory control, suggesting that after exerting effort, people disengage and become uninterested in exerting further effort.
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At the center of social psychology just a few years ago, ego depletion is now widely seen as a controversial topic, one of the chief victims of the replication crisis. Despite over 600 studies of apparent support, many are now asking if ego depletion is even real. Here, we comment on the articles included in this Special Issue: Ego Depletion and Self-Control: Conceptual and Empirical Advances. Specifically, we delineate the contributions and limitations of these articles by embedding them in a brief history of ego depletion, describing the current state of uncertainty about ego depletion’s scientific status, and outlining necessary steps for the study of ego depletion to have a healthy future. To us, the most troubling aspect of this controversy is not what it suggests about ego depletion, but what it suggests about social psychology more broadly. If the mere existence of ego depletion is seriously doubted by many, what can be confidently regarded as real in social psychology? By increasing the precision of our theories, continuously validating our manipulations and measures, and practicing the full suite of open science practices, we have the potential to identify legitimate and robust effects and build a cumulative and trustworthy psychological science.
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Purpose in Life (PIL) is often associated with grand achievements and existential beliefs, but recent theory suggests that it might ultimately track gainful pursuit of basic evolved goals. Five studies (N=1,993) investigate the relationships between fundamental social motives and PIL. In Study 1, attribution of a life goal pursuit to disease avoidance, affiliation, or kin care motives correlated with higher PIL. Studies 2 and 3 found correlations of self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, mate retention, and kin care motives with PIL after controlling for potential confounds. Study 4 showed that writing about success in the status, mating, and kin care domains increased PIL. Study 5 replicated the effect for mating and kin care, but not for status. Results imply that fundamental motives link to PIL through a sense of progress, rather than raw desire. Overall, this set of studies suggests that pursuit of evolved fundamental goals contributes to a purposeful life.
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It is commonly assumed that a person’s emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices; guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications; and pervades everyday social interactions as well as research in other scientific fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and computer vision. In this article, we survey examples of this widespread assumption, which we refer to as the common view, and we then examine the scientific evidence that tests this view, focusing on the six most popular emotion categories used by consumers of emotion research: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, as proposed by the common view, more than what would be expected by chance. Yet how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation. Furthermore, similar configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category. In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something other than an emotional state. Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of information and are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise. But our review suggests an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions and how they infer emotional meaning from facial movements in situations of everyday life. This research is crucial to provide consumers of emotion research with the translational information they require.
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This study examined two facets of emotion development: emotion word comprehension (knowing the meaning of emotion words such as “anger” or “excitement”) and emotion concept abstraction (representing emotions in terms of internal psychological states that generalize across situations). Using a novel emotion vocabulary assessment, we captured how a cross-sectional sample of participants aged 4-25 (N=196) defined 24 emotions. Smoothing spline regression models suggested that emotion comprehension followed an emergent shape: knowledge of emotion words increased across childhood and plateaued around age 11. Human coders rated the abstractness of participants’ responses, and these ratings also followed an emergent shape but plateaued significantly later than comprehension, around age 18. An automated linguistic analysis of abstractness supported coders’ perceptions of increased abstractness across age. Finally, coders assessed the definitional “strategies” participants used to describe emotions. Young children tended to describe emotions using concrete strategies such as providing example situations that evoked those emotions or by referring to physiological markers of emotional experiences. Whereas use of these concrete strategies decreased with age, the tendency to use more abstract strategies such as providing general definitions that delineated the causes and characteristics of emotions or by providing synonyms of emotion words increased with age. Overall, this work (i) provides a tool for assessing definitions of emotion terms, (ii) demonstrates that emotion concept abstraction increases across age, and (iii) suggests that adolescence is a period in which emotion words are comprehended but their level of abstraction continues to mature.
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Jealousy appears to have clear adaptive functions across species: it emerges when an important social relationship with a valued social partner is threatened by third-party that is perceived as a rival. Dyads of dogs living together and their owners were tested adapting a procedure devised to study jealousy in young human siblings. Owners at first ignored both dogs while reading a magazine (Control episode), and then petted and praised one of the dogs while ignoring the other, and vice versa (Experimental episodes). We found several differences in the dogs' behavior between the Experimental episodes and the Control episode, even though only monitoring (gazing at the owner) was exhibited for a significantly greater amount of time in the Experimental episodes. Remarkable individual behavioral differences emerged, suggesting that the dogs' reactions could be influenced by the relationships that they establish with their owner and the companion dog. Overall, current results do not clearly support our prediction that the ignored dogs would exhibit more behaviors aimed at regaining the owner's attention when their owner directed attention and care to a companion dog, compared to the control situation. The great intra- and inter-dyad behavioral variability and the choice to test cohabiting dogs could have prevented the emergence of a clear jealous reaction. These findings do not exclude that dogs may exhibit a primordial form of jealousy in a realistic situation, but an additional research is needed to fully gauge which situations, if any, could trigger jealousy in dogs and to rule out alternative explanations.
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Boredom is a prevalent emotion with potential negative consequences. Previous research has associated boredom with outcomes indicating both high and low levels of arousal and activation. In the present study we propose that the situational context is an important factor that may determine whether boredom relates to high versus low arousal/activation reactions. In a correlational (N = 443) and an experimental study (N = 120) we focused on the situational factor (perceived) task autonomy, and examined whether it explains when boredom is associated with high versus low arousal affective reactions (i.e., frustration versus depressed affect). Results of both studies indicate that when task autonomy is low, state boredom relates to more frustration than when task autonomy is high. In contrast, some support (i.e., Study 1 only) was found suggesting that when task autonomy is high, state boredom relates to more depressed affect than when task autonomy is low. These findings imply that careful attention is needed for tasks that are relatively boring. In order to reduce frustration caused by such tasks, substantial autonomy should be provided, while monitoring that this does not result in increased depressed affect.
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What is boredom? We review environmental, attentional, and functional theories and present a new model that describes boredom as an affective indicator of unsuccessful attentional engagement in valued goal-congruent activity. According to the Meaning and Attentional Components (MAC) model, boredom is the result of (a) an attentional component, namely mismatches between cognitive demands and available mental resources, and (b) a meaning component, namely mismatches between activities and valued goals (or the absence of valued goals altogether). We present empirical support for four novel predictions made by the model: (a) Deficits in attention and meaning each produce boredom independently of the other; (b) there are different profiles of boredom that result from specific deficits in attention and meaning; (c) boredom results from two types of attentional deficits, understimulation and overstimulation; and (d) the model explains not only when and why people become bored with external activities, but also when and why people become bored with their own thoughts. We discuss further implications of the model, such as when boredom motivates people to seek interesting versus enjoyable activities. (PsycINFO Database Record
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The function of jealous behaviour is to facilitate the maintenance of an important social relationship that is threatened by a third-party, a rival individual. Although jealous behaviour has an important function in gregarious species, it has been investigated almost exclusively in humans. Based on functional similarity between dog-owner and mother-infant attachments, we hypothesised that jealous behaviour can be evoked in dogs, similarly to children. In our study owners focused their attention solely on the test partner, while they ignored their dog. We deployed familiar and unfamiliar dogs as social test partners, and familiar and unfamiliar objects as non-social test partners; all subjects encountered all test partners. Dogs showed more jealous behaviour, i.e. owner-oriented behaviour and attempts to separate the owner and test partner in case of social compared to non-social test partners. Results suggest that jealous behaviour emerges in dogs, and it is functionally similar to that in children observed in similar situations. Alternative explanations like territoriality, dominance rank can be excluded.
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Domestic dogs are highly social and have been shown to be sensitive not only to the actions of humans and other dogs but to the interactions between them. We used the C-BARQ scale to estimate dogs' aggressiveness, and we used noninvasive brain imaging (fMRI) to measure activity in their amygdala (an area involved in aggression). More aggressive dogs had more amygdala activation data while watching their caregiver give food to a realistic fake dog than when they put the food in a bucket. This may have some similarity to human jealousy, adding to a growing body of evidence that differences in specific brain activities correlate with differences in canine temperament. The amygdala response habituates when an interaction is observed repeatedly, suggesting that repeated exposures may be a useful behavioral intervention with potentially aggressive dogs.
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While dog owners ascribe different emotions to their pets, including jealousy, research on secondary emotions in nonhuman animals is very limited and, so far, only one study has investigated jealousy in dogs (Canis familiaris). This work explores jealousy in dogs one step further. We conducted two studies adapting a procedure devised to assess jealousy in human infants. In each study 36 adult dogs were exposed to a situation in which their owner and a stranger ignored them while directing positive attention towards three different objects: a book, a puppet and a fake dog (Study 1: furry; Study 2: plastic). Overall, the results of both studies do not provide evidence that the behavioral responses of our dogs were triggered by jealousy: we did not find a clear indication that the fake dogs were perceived as real social rivals, neither the furry nor the plastic one. Indeed, dogs exhibited a higher interest (i.e. look at, interact with) towards the fake dogs, but differences in the behavior towards the fake dog and the puppet only emerged in Study 2. In addition, many of the behaviors (protest, stress, attention seeking, aggression) that are considered distinctive features of jealousy were not expressed or were expressed to a limited extent, revealing that dogs did not actively try to regain their owner’s attention or interfere with the interaction between the owner and the faux rival. Finally, a differentiated response towards the attachment figure (the owner) and the unfamiliar person (the stranger) did not emerge. Differently from what reported in human infants, dogs’ behavior towards the attachment figure and the stranger interacting with the potential competitor (in this case, the fake dog) did not significantly differ: in both studies dogs paid attention to the owner and the stranger manipulating the fake dog to the same extent. In conclusion, we do not exclude that dogs could possess a rudimentary form of jealousy, but we suggest that research on this topic should require the use of a real social interloper (conspecific or human) and more naturalistic procedures.
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What do people feel like doing after they have exerted cognitive effort or are bored? Here, we empirically test whether people are drawn to rewards (at the neural level) following cognitive effort and boredom. This elucidates the experiences and consequences of engaging in cognitive effort, and compares it to the consequences of experiencing boredom, an affective state with predicted similar motivational consequences. Event-related potentials were recorded after participants (N=243) were randomized into one of three conditions - boredom (passively observing strings of numbers), cognitive effort (adding 3 to each digit of a four-digit number), or control. In the subsequent task, we focused on the feedback negativity (FN) to assess the brain's immediate response to the presence or absence of reward. Phenomenologically, participants in the boredom condition reported more fatigue than those in the cognitive effort condition, despite reporting exerting less effort. Results suggest participants in the boredom condition exhibited larger FN amplitude than participants in the control condition, while the cognitive effort condition was neither different from boredom nor control. The neural and methodological implications for ego depletion research, including issues of replicability, are discussed.
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Building on functional models of emotion, we propose that boredom creates a seeking state that prompts people to explore new experiences, even if those experiences are hedonically negative. Specifically, as emotional responses fade, boredom motivates the pursuit of alternative experiences that differ from the experience that resulted in boredom. Participants who reported a higher degree of boredom after a neutral task were more likely to choose negative experiences (Study 1). Compared with a low-boredom condition, participants in a high-boredom condition desired novel experiences and, as a result of this desire, were more likely to choose novel negative experiences (Study 2). In Study 3, participants were made bored by positive or negative stimuli. Participants in the positive-boredom conditions were more likely to choose a novel experience that was more negative; participants in the negative-boredom conditions were more likely to choose a novel experience that was more positive. These findings reveal that boredom motivates people to seek out novel experiences that elicit different (even more negative) feelings. (PsycINFO Database Record
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The classical view of emotion hypothesizes that certain emotion categories have a specific autonomic nervous system (ANS) “fingerprint” that is distinct from other categories. Substantial ANS variation within a category is presumed to be epiphenomenal. The theory of constructed emotion hypothesizes that an emotion category is a population of context-specific, highly variable instances that need not share an ANS fingerprint. Instead, ANS variation within a category is a meaningful part of the nature of emotion. We present a meta-analysis of 202 studies measuring ANS reactivity during lab-based inductions of emotion in nonclinical samples of adults, using a random effects, multilevel meta-analysis and multivariate pattern classification analysis to test our hypotheses. We found increases in mean effect size for 59.4% of ANS variables across emotion categories, but the pattern of effect sizes did not clearly distinguish 1 emotion category from another. We also observed significant variation within emotion categories; heterogeneity accounted for a moderate to substantial percentage (i.e., I2 ≥ 30%) of variability in 54% of these effect sizes. Experimental moderators epiphenomenal to emotion, such as induction type (e.g., films vs. imagery), did not explain a large portion of the variability. Correction for publication bias reduced estimated effect sizes even further, increasing heterogeneity of effect sizes for certain emotion categories. These findings, when considered in the broader empirical literature, are more consistent with population thinking and other principles from evolutionary biology found within the theory of constructed emotion, and offer insights for developing new hypotheses to understand the nature of emotion.
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Social science researchers increasingly recruit participants through Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform. Yet, the physical isolation of MTurk participants, and perceived lack of experimental control have led to persistent concerns about the quality of the data that can be obtained from MTurk samples. In this paper we focus on two of the most salient concerns—that MTurk participants may not buy into interactive experiments and that they may produce unreliable or invalid data. We review existing research on these topics and present new data to address these concerns. We find that insufficient attention is no more a problem among MTurk samples than among other commonly used convenience or high-quality commercial samples, and that MTurk participants buy into interactive experiments and trust researchers as much as participants in laboratory studies. Furthermore, we find that employing rigorous exclusion methods consistently boosts statistical power without introducing problematic side effects (e.g., substantially biasing the post-exclusion sample), and can thus provide a general solution for dealing with problematic respondents across samples. We conclude with a discussion of best practices and recommendations.
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By presenting and synthesizing findings on the character of boredom, the article advances a theoretical account of the function of the state of boredom. The article argues that the state of boredom should be understood as a functional emotion that is both informative and regulatory of one's behavior. Boredom informs one of the presence of an unsatisfactory situation and, at the same time, it motivates one to pursue a new goal when the current goal ceases to be satisfactory, attractive or meaningful. Boredom ultimately promotes both movement and the restoration of the perception that one's activities are meaningful and congruent with one's overall projects.
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Boredom is likely to have adaptive value in motivating exploration and learning, and many animals may possess the basic neurological mechanisms to support it. Chronic inescapable boredom can be extremely aversive, and understimulation can harm neural, cognitive and behavioural flexibility. Wild and domesticated animals are at particular risk in captivity, which is often spatially and temporally monotonous. Yet biological research into boredom has barely begun, despite having important implications for animal welfare, the evolution of motivation and cognition, and for human dysfunction at individual and societal levels. Here I aim to facilitate hypotheses about how monotony affects behaviour and physiology, so that boredom can be objectively studied by ethologists and other scientists. I cover valence (pleasantness) and arousal (wakefulness) qualities of boredom, because both can be measured, and I suggest boredom includes suboptimal arousal and aversion to monotony. Because the suboptimal arousal during boredom is aversive, individuals will resist low arousal. Thus, behavioural indicators of boredom will, seemingly paradoxically, include signs of increasing drowsiness, alongside bouts of restlessness, avoidance and sensation-seeking behaviour. Valence and arousal are not, however, sufficient to fully describe boredom. For example, human boredom is further characterized by a perception that time ‘drags’, and this effect of monotony on time perception can too be behaviourally assayed in animals. Sleep disruption and some abnormal behaviour may also be caused by boredom. Ethological research into this emotional phenomenon will deepen understanding of its causes, development, function and evolution, and will enable evidence-based interventions to mitigate human and animal boredom.
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Can people enjoy thinking if they set their mind to it? Previous work suggests that many people do not enjoy the deliberate attempt to have pleasurable thoughts. We suggest that deliberately thinking for pleasure requires mental resources that people are either unwilling or unable to devote to the task. If so, then people should enjoy pleasant thoughts that occur unintentionally more than pleasant thoughts that occur intentionally. This hypothesis was confirmed in an experience sampling study (Study 1) in which participants were contacted 4 times a day for 7 days and asked to rate what they had been thinking about. In Studies 2-5 we experimentally manipulated how easy it was for people to engage in pleasurable thought when given the goal of doing so. All participants listed topics they would enjoy thinking about; then some were given a simple "thinking aid" that was designed to make this experience easier. Participants who received the aid found the experience easier and enjoyed it more. The findings suggest that thinking for pleasure is cognitively demanding, but that a simple thinking aid makes it easier and more enjoyable. (PsycINFO Database Record
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We report new evidence on the emotional, demographic, and situational correlates of boredom from a rich experience sample capturing 1.1 million emotional and time-use reports from 3,867 U.S. adults. Subjects report boredom in 2.8% of the 30-min sampling periods, and 63% of participants report experiencing boredom at least once across the 10-day sampling period. We find that boredom is more likely to co-occur with negative, rather than positive, emotions, and is particularly predictive of loneliness, anger, sadness, and worry. Boredom is more prevalent among men, youths, the unmarried, and those of lower income. We find that differences in how such demographic groups spend their time account for up to one third of the observed differences in overall boredom. The importance of situations in predicting boredom is additionally underscored by the high prevalence of boredom in specific situations involving monotonous or difficult tasks (e.g., working, studying) or contexts where one's autonomy might be constrained (e.g., time with coworkers, afternoons, at school). Overall, our findings are consistent with cognitive accounts that cast boredom as emerging from situations in which engagement is difficult, and are less consistent with accounts that exclusively associate boredom with low arousal or with situations lacking in meaning. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Boredom research is booming. Nonetheless, a comprehensive understanding of boredom in relation to other negative emotions is lacking. This ambiguity impedes accurate interpretation of boredom's causes and consequences. To gain more insights into boredom, we examined in detail how it differs from a range of other negative experiences, namely sadness, anger, frustration, fear, disgust, depression, guilt, shame, regret, and disappointment. Our research indicates that the appraisals associated with boredom distinguish it clearly from other negative emotions; conceptually (Study 1), in terms of state experiences (Study 2), and in terms of individual differences in these experiences (Study 3). Our findings suggest that boredom is mild in negative valence, low in arousal, is associated with low perceived challenge and low perceived meaningfulness, and has low relevance to moral judgment and behavior. Boredom also involves low attention given to situations and tasks, and the lack of perceived meaningfulness and attention associated with boredom emerged as particularly distinctive characteristics. The findings underscore the importance of carefully discriminating boredom from other emotions in experimental induction, psychometric assessment, and conceptual discussion. (PsycINFO Database Record
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The authors find that experimental studies using online samples (e.g., MTurk) often violate the assumption of random assignment, because participant attrition-quitting a study before completing it and getting paid-is not only prevalent, but also varies systemically across experimental conditions. Using standard social psychology paradigms (e.g., ego-depletion, construal level), they observed attrition rates ranging from 30% to 50% (Study 1). The authors show that failing to attend to attrition rates in online panels has grave consequences. By introducing experimental confounds, unattended attrition misled them to draw mind-boggling yet false conclusions: that recalling a few happy events is considerably more effortful than recalling many happy events, and that imagining applying eyeliner leads to weight loss (Study 2). In addition, attrition rate misled them to draw a logical yet false conclusion: that explaining one's view on gun rights decreases progun sentiment (Study 3). The authors offer a partial remedy (Study 4) and call for minimizing and reporting experimental attrition in studies conducted on the Web. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Boredom is a ubiquitous human experience that can best be described as an inability to engage with one's environment despite the motivation to do so. Boredom is perceived as a negative experience and demonstrates strong associations with other negatively valenced states including depression and aggression. Although boredom has been shown to be elevated in neurological and psychiatric illnesses, little is known about the neural underpinnings of the state. We scanned the brains of healthy participants under four separate conditions: a resting state scan, a sustained attention task and two video-based mood inductions, one known to produce boredom and another we validated to produce a state of interest or engagement. Using independent components analyses, results showed common regions of correlated activation in posterior regions of the so-called default mode network (DMN) of the brain across all four conditions. The sustained attention and boredom induction scans were differentiated from the resting state scan by the presence of anticorrelated activity-i.e. when DMN regions were active, this region was deactivated-in the anterior insula cortex. This same region demonstrated correlated activity with both the DMN and the regions associated with attentional control during the interest mood induction. We interpret these findings to suggest that boredom represents a failure to engage executive control networks when faced with a monotonous task-in other words, when the task demands some level of engagement (watch the movie, search for infrequent targets), but is so mundane that attempts to do so fail.
Preprint
Does boredom increase risk behaviors in real-world settings, and if so, might it contribute to failure to comply with public health guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic? In a large cross-national sample of 63,336 community respondents from 116 countries, we examined the prevalence of lockdown-related boredom during the initial outbreak of COVID-19, as well as its demographic and situational predictors. Boredom was higher in countries with more COVID-19 cases, more stringent lockdown policies, and lower GDPs, as well as among men and less educated/younger adults. Additionally, we examined whether “pandemic boredom” predicted longitudinal decreases in social distancing behavior (and vice versa; n = 8031). We found little evidence that changes in boredom predict individual public health behaviors (handwashing, staying home, self-quarantining, avoiding crowds) over time, or that such behaviors had any reliable longitudinal effects on boredom itself. In summary, we found little evidence that boredom affects pandemic health behaviors.
Book
Weaving together stories from sources as wide-ranging as classical literature, social and cognitive psychology, philosophy, art, and video games, Propelled: How Boredom, Frustration, and Anticipation Lead Us to the Good Life makes a lively case for the value of discontent in our lives. It offers novel, detailed, and scientifically informed characterizations of the nature and outcomes of boredom, frustration, and anticipation. The book demonstrates why these three states should not be viewed as obstacles to our goals but as elements of the good life and explicates how they can illuminate our desires and expectations, inform us when we find ourselves stuck in unpleasant and unfulfilling situations, and motivate us to furnish our lives with meaning, interest, and value.
Article
Purpose: Boredom is an accepted part of adolescence. Developmental and contextual factors are likely to conspire to increase boredom during adolescence, which, in turn, relates to health risk behaviors. However, literature is lacking in the developmental course of boredom across adolescence as well as historical variation in boredom. The present study used multicohort nationally representative samples of U.S. secondary school students to identify historical trends and grade level differences in boredom overall and by sex. Methods: The present study includes 8th, 10th, and 12th graders from 2008 to 2017 who completed the Monitoring the Future self-report survey (n = 106,784). Joinpoint was used to identify historical trends in boredom and linear regression to identify grade level differences. Results: Boredom increased historically both across and within grades with girls generally demonstrating greater increases than boys. Across grade, boredom appears to peak in 10th grade for boys and decrease across grade for girls. Conclusions: Study findings indicate boredom has been increasing among adolescents over the past several years, with greater increases among girls. Increases may be concomitant with recent increases in mental health difficulties, suggesting that the overarching psychosocial profile of U.S. adolescents is becoming less optimal. Findings also suggest boredom peaks in 10th grade overall although when analyzing separately by sex, girls' boredom declines from 8th to 12th grade. It is clear that boredom is a worthy target for intervention both in clinical and prevention contexts.
Article
Is boredom bad? It is certainly common: Most everybody gets bored. There is a sense that boredom sometimes causes bad things to happen (e.g., substance use, self-harm) and sometimes causes good things to happen (e.g., daydreaming, creativity), but it is hard to understand what boredom does without first understanding what it is. According to the meaning-and-attentional-components (MAC) model of boredom and cognitive engagement, the emotion of boredom signals deficits in attention and meaning. Much like pain, it may not be pleasant, but boredom critically alerts us that we are unable or unwilling to successfully engage attention in meaningful activities. Whether that is good or bad rests ultimately on how we respond.
Article
The Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS) is the only full-scale designed to assess the propensity to boredom. This scale is a theoretical. The aim of the present study was twofold: (a) replicate the factorial structure of the BPS, and (b) examine whether the BPS scores specifically capture trait boredom or are confounded by the state of participants when they complete the BPS. For this second purpose a trait-state-occasion model (TSO) was applied to BPS scores obtained at four time points over a 6-year period among a sample of community-dwelling elderly persons. Our findings showed that the factorial structure of the BPS was not replicable. They also showed that the short-version of the BPS, comprising 8 items, was the best representation of our data. Results from the TSO revealed that only 28% of the variance in the BPS-8 scores were imputable to trait-boredom component. Thus, 72% of this variance were due to both state-boredom (8%) and measurement errors (64%). The utility of this scale was discussed.
Chapter
The research area regarding boredom has received increased import in the past several years owning to its relationship to risky and unhealthy behaviors. Boredom also has a profound effect on school aged children and adolescents along with the growing elder-hood population. From the boredom proneness scale (BPS), multiple studies have address everything from psychological correlates to boredom as avenue for creativity. This chapter reviews the research in this area including the types and causes of boredom and positive strategies to address trait and state boredom.
Article
Even though researchers regularly use neutral affect induction procedures (AIPs) as a control condition in their work, there is little consensus on what is neutral affect. This article reviews five approaches that researchers have used to operationalize neutral AIPs: to produce a(n) (a) minimal affective state, (b) in-the-middle state, (c) deactivated state, (d) typical state, or (e) indifferent state. For each view, the article delineates the theoretical basis for the neutral AIP, how to assess it, and provides recommendations for when and how to use it. The goal of the article is to encourage researchers to state their theoretical assumptions about neutral affect, to validate those assumptions, and to make appropriate conclusions based on them.
Article
People differ in how specifically they separate affective experiences into different emotion types—a skill called emotion differentiation or emotional granularity. Although increased emotion differentiation has been associated with positive mental health outcomes, little is known about its development. Participants (N = 143) between the ages of 5 and 25 years completed a laboratory measure of negative emotion differentiation in which they rated how much a series of aversive images made them feel angry, disgusted, sad, scared, and upset. Emotion-differentiation scores were computed using intraclass correlations. Emotion differentiation followed a nonlinear developmental trajectory: It fell from childhood to adolescence and rose from adolescence to adulthood. Mediation analyses suggested that an increased tendency to report feeling emotions one at a time explained elevated emotion differentiation in childhood. Importantly, two other mediators (intensity of emotional experiences and scale use) did not explain this developmental trend. Hence, low emotion differentiation in adolescence may arise because adolescents have little experience conceptualizing co-occurring emotions.
Article
Scientists and lay-people alike have long been fascinated with the emotional lives of nonhuman animals. To date, scientific approaches to the study of “animal” emotion have assumed that emotions are biologically evolutionarily conserved, hardwired and have discrete behavioral and physiological outputs. According to this view, emotions and their outputs are homologous across species, allowing humans to accurately perceive (or “read”) animal emotion using our own concepts of what emotions are. In this paper, I discuss the challenges to that perspective and propose using an alternative theoretical approach to understand animal emotion. Adopting this alternative approach which represents a collection of similar theories (referred to as “Theories of Constructed Emotion”) changes the questions that we ask about animal emotion, how we study emotion across phylogeny and advance translational science, and how we understand the evolution of emotion.
Article
In this manuscript, I briefly outline contemporary psychological constructionist approaches to the study of emotion, which hypothesize that language is an “ingredient” in the creation of emotional perceptions and experiences. I then review recent neuroimaging, behavioral, and lesion evidence that emotion words (“anger,” “disgust,” “fear”) are crucial to the perception and experience of emotions. Finally, I look to future directions for more causal evidence that language is important in emotion.
Article
This paper examines attention checks and manipulation validations to detect inattentive respondents in primary empirical data collection. These prima facie attention checks range from the simple such as reverse scaling first proposed a century ago to more recent and involved methods such as evaluating response patterns and timed responses via online data capture tools. The attention check validations also range from easily implemented mechanisms such as automatic detection through directed queries to highly intensive investigation of responses by the researcher. The latter has the potential to introduce inadvertent researcher bias as the researcher's judgment may impact the interpretation of the data. The empirical findings of the present work reveal that construct and scale validations show consistently significant improvement in the fit statistics—a finding of great use for researchers working predominantly with scales and constructs for their empirical models. However, based on the rudimentary experimental models employed in the analysis, attention checks generally do not show a consistent, systematic improvement in the significance of test statistics for experimental manipulations. This latter result indicates that, by their very nature, attention checks may trigger an inherent trade-off between loss of sample subjects—lowered power and increased Type II error—and the potential of capitalizing on chance alone—the possibility that the previously significant results were in fact the result of Type I error. The analysis also shows that the attrition rates due to attention checks—upwards of 70% in some observed samples—are far larger than typically assumed. Such loss rates raise the specter that studies not validating attention may inadvertently increase their Type I error rate. The manuscript provides general guidelines for various attention checks, discusses the psychological nuances of the methods, and highlights the delicate balance among incentive alignment, monetary compensation, and the subsequently triggered mood of respondents.
Article
Boredom and low levels of task engagement while driving can pose road safety risks, e.g., inattention during low traffic, routine trips, or semi-automated driving. Digital technology interventions that increase task engagement, e.g., through performance feedback, increased challenge, and incentives (often referred to as ‘gamification’), could therefore offer safety benefits. To explore the impact of such interventions, we conducted experiments in a high-fidelity driving simulator with thirty-two participants. In two counterbalanced conditions (control and intervention), we compared driving behaviour, physiological arousal, and subjective experience. Results indicate that the gamified boredom intervention reduced unsafe coping mechanisms such as speeding while promoting anticipatory driving. We can further infer that the intervention not only increased one’s attention and arousal during the intermittent gamification challenges, but that these intermittent stimuli may also help sustain one’s attention and arousal in between challenges and throughout a drive. At the same time, the gamified condition led to slower hazard reactions and short off-road glances. Our contributions deepen our understanding of driver boredom and pave the way for engaging interventions for safety critical tasks.
Article
Here we investigate whether systems that minimize prediction error e.g. predictive coding, can also show creativity, or on the contrary, prediction error minimization unqualifies for the design of systems that respond in creative ways to non recurrent problems. We argue that there is a key ingredient that has been overlooked by researchers that needs to be incorporated to understand intelligent behavior in biological and technical systems. This ingredient is boredom. We propose a mathematical model based on the Black-Scholes-Merton equation which provides mechanistic insights into the interplay between boredom and prediction pleasure as the key drivers of behavior.
Article
There is much debate on the value of the arts and humanities in our society. Each side provides strong arguments, but there has been little empirical research to draw on. A key reason for the lack of scientific evidence is the absence of a conceptual model on which to base investigations of the ways the arts and the humanities might contribute to human flourishing. To address this, we present a model to demarcate the domain of the arts and humanities by means of an extensional definition (e.g., majors, disciplines, and occupations) integrated with a functional analysis (i.e., modes of engagement and activities of involvement). We suggest immersion, embeddedness, socialization, and reflectiveness as mechanisms by which the arts and humanities may enhance various forms of human flourishing. We conclude with implications of the model and ideas for future research to investigate the effects of the arts and humanities on human flourishing.
Article
Boredom is typically regarded a nuisance. Past research on boredom depicts this common emotion as a correlate of many detrimental psychological and social factors, including addiction, depression, discrimination, and aggression. We present a more nuanced perspective on boredom. Specifically, we propose and test that state boredom serves an important self-regulatory function with the potential to foster positive interpersonal consequences: It signals a lack of purpose in activity and fosters a search for meaningful engagement. We examined whether boredom can subsequently cause prosocial intentions if the corresponding prosocial behavior is seen as purposeful. As predicted, boredom, which is characterized by a search for meaning (pilot study), promoted prosocial intentions (Experiment 1), in particular when the corresponding behavior was seen as highly meaningful (Experiment 2). Our novel findings suggest that boredom can have desirable consequences and recasts this emotion as not merely good or bad but rather as personally and socially functional.
Article
In the current society, boredom has a bad reputation. Among others, one reason is that boredom is a negative predictor for cognitive performance due to the detrimental effects on attention and engagement. Recently, however, the negative reputation has been challenged by studies showing that boredom seems to promote creativity. However, those studies examined the influence of incidental boredom on apparently unrelated creativity tasks, leaving it open to question what happens when the individual gets bored by the task itself. To examine this issue, participants performed six blocks of a creativity task, and we measured creativity performance and experienced boredom across blocks. Results showed that boredom increased in parallel with fluency performance. However, more detailed analyses showed that the fluency increase was not brought about by the increase in boredom but was fully accounted for by the effect of increased task practice. When controlling for practice effects, results revealed that boredom actually impaired fluency. Such a finding supports the view that boredom has a negative impact on cognitive performance and underlines the necessity for changes in educational settings to prevent boredom.