Lost by definition: Why boredom matters for psychology and society

Boredom signals deviation from a cognitive homeostatic set point

Boredom is the feeling of wanting but failing to engage the mind and can be conceived as one among many signals of suboptimal utilization of cognitive and neural resources. Using homeostasis as an analogy, this perspective argues that boredom represents a signal indicating deviation from optimal engagement-that is, deviation from a cognitive homeostatic set point. Within this model, allostasis accounts for chronic boredom (i.e., trait boredom proneness), according to which faulty internal models are responsible for why the highly boredom prone may set unrealistic expectations for engagement. In other words, the model characterizes boredom as a dynamic response to both internal and external exigencies, leading to testable hypotheses for both the nature of the state and the trait disposition. Furthermore, this perspective presents the broader notion that humans strive to optimally engage with their environs to maintain a kind of cognitive homeostatic set-point.

"I Am Easily Bored." Analysis of a Single Item Measure of Boredom

Measuring a variety of human characteristics in large databases has been invaluable for applied (e.g., epidemiology) and basic research (e.g., brain imaging). The sheer volume of data being collected can place high demands on participants. This raises the challenge of how to maximize the reliability of measures while minimizing the burden on participants. We examined the viability of a single item to measure trait boredom proneness by having participants respond to the question "I am easily bored." Results indicated that this single item effectively captures relations typically observed when using longer state and trait boredom measures. Psychological network analyses suggested that the item accords well with models of trait boredom as a failure to launch. We discuss potential contexts in which deploying a single item of this kind may prove advantageous.

Breathwork-induced psychedelic experiences modulate neural dynamics

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.

Tiredness of Life - Conceptualizing a Complex Phenomenon

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.

Utilising online paradigms to explore the effect of boredom and sadness on children's snack choice: The role of parental feeding practices and child temperament

Emotional eating (EE) is defined as eating in response to negative emotions (e.g., sadness and boredom). Child temperament and parental feeding practices are predictive of child EE and may interact to shape child EE. Previous research has demonstrated that children eat more when they are experiencing sadness, however, boredom-EE (despite how common boredom is in children) has yet to be explored experimentally using remote methodologies. The current study explores whether feeding practices and child temperament interact with mood to predict children's snack selection in an online hypothetical food choice task. Using online experimental methods, children aged 6-9-years (N = 347) were randomised to watch a mood-inducing video clip (control, sadness, or boredom). Children completed a hypothetical food choice task from images of four snacks in varying portion sizes. The kilocalories in children's online snack choices were measured. Parents reported their feeding practices and child's temperament. Results indicated that the online paradigm successfully induced feelings of boredom and sadness, but these induced feelings of boredom and sadness did not significantly shape children's online food selection. Parental reports of use of restriction for health reasons (F = 8.64, p = .004, n2 = 0.25) and children's negative emotionality (F = 6.81, p = .009, n2 = 0.020) were significantly related to greater total kilocalorie selection by children. Three-way ANCOVAs found no evidence of any three-way interactions between temperament, feeding practices, and mood in predicting children's online snack food selection. These findings suggest that children's hypothetical snack food selection may be shaped by non-responsive feeding practices and child temperament. This study's findings also highlight different methods that can be successfully used to stimulate emotional experiences in children by using novel online paradigms, and also discusses the challenges around using online methods to measure children's intended food choice.

Is life going too fast? Exploring the unique and joint contributions of mindfulness, temperament, task load, and metacognitions about time

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.

Bored to death: Artificial Intelligence research reveals the role of boredom in suicide behavior

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.

The effects of negative social media connotations on subjective wellbeing of an ageing population: A stressor-strain-outcome perspective

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.

Bored and spoiling for a flight: capabilities lost and found in lockdown

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.

A highly replicable decline in mood during rest and simple tasks

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.

In search of boredom: beyond a functional account

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.

I enjoy hurting my classmates: On the relation of boredom and sadism in schools

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.

Pet Owner Perception of Ferret Boredom and Consequences for Housing, Husbandry, and Environmental Enrichment

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.

Having a Break or Being Imprisoned: Influence of Subjective Interpretations of Quarantine and Isolation on Boredom

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.