Why Boredom Is Interesting

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Abstract

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.

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Most cited references 27

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How emotion shapes behavior: feedback, anticipation, and reflection, rather than direct causation.

Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, C Dewall … (2007)

Fear causes fleeing and thereby saves lives: this exemplifies a popular and common sense but increasingly untenable view that the direct causation of behavior is the primary function of emotion. Instead, the authors develop a theory of emotion as a feedback system whose influence on behavior is typically indirect. By providing feedback and stimulating retrospective appraisal of actions, conscious emotional states can promote learning and alter guidelines for future behavior. Behavior may also be chosen to pursue (or avoid) anticipated emotional outcomes. Rapid, automatic affective responses, in contrast to the full-blown conscious emotions, may inform cognition and behavioral choice and thereby help guide current behavior. The automatic affective responses may also remind the person of past emotional outcomes and provide useful guides as to what emotional outcomes may be anticipated in the present. To justify replacing the direct causation model with the feedback model, the authors review a large body of empirical findings.

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Are Emotions Natural Kinds?

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2016)

Laypeople and scientists alike believe that they know anger, or sadness, or fear, when they see it. These emotions and a few others are presumed to have specific causal mechanisms in the brain and properties that are observable (on the face, in the voice, in the body, or in experience)-that is, they are assumed to be natural kinds. If a given emotion is a natural kind and can be identified objectively, then it is possible to make discoveries about that emotion. Indeed, the scientific study of emotion is founded on this assumption. In this article, I review the accumulating empirical evidence that is inconsistent with the view that there are kinds of emotion with boundaries that are carved in nature. I then consider what moving beyond a natural-kind view might mean for the scientific understanding of emotion.

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Boredom in achievement settings: Exploring control–value antecedents and performance outcomes of a neglected emotion.

Raymond P. Perry, Reinhard Pekrun, Thomas Goetz … (2010)

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Author and article information

Journal

Title: Current Directions in Psychological Science

Abbreviated Title: Curr Dir Psychol Sci

Publisher: SAGE Publications

ISSN (Print): 0963-7214

ISSN (Electronic): 1467-8721

Publication date (Electronic): November 08 2019

Page: 096372141988430

Affiliations

[1 ]Department of Psychology, University of Florida

Article

DOI: 10.1177/0963721419884309

SO-VID: 3195f5e1-b877-4b22-bfbf-e77de17a4da3

License:

http://www.sagepub.com/licence-information-for-chorus

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