Boredom: The Consequences Of Boredom

Sitting in a car and driving for hours. Standing in line and waiting to be next. Or filling out paperwork. In all these situations boredom is present. Boredom, a psychophysiological state (O'hanlon, 1981), which occurs when people are unable to engage in meaningful and satisfying activity (Mercer-Lynn, Bar, & Eastwood, 2014). Boredom is situation specific and a reaction to task situation, especially tasks which are described as monotone can trigger boredom. Besides, people experience boredom when a situation/task is effortless and repetitive. Consequences of boredom are decrease in general life satisfaction and health. To escape from this unpleasant emotion of boredom, people need to engage in other activity or stimulation (O'hanlon, 1981). One way that is associated with the …show more content…
During both conditions women could eat from a bowl filled with crackers. The result of the study showed that women who were induced with boredom ate twice as much crackers than women in the neutral condition. Thus, people who are expose to monotony feel bored. To escape boredom people are seeking for a positive change in stimulation or activity. The study of Havermans, Vancleef, Kalamatianos, and Nederkoorn (2015) went one step further and examined if people not only engage in positive stimulation to escape boredom, but if they would also make use of negative stimulation. To do so Havermans et al. (2015) also induced boredom through a monotonous task, namely watching a section from a documentary over and over again for one hour. In the first experiment participants had access to a positive stimulus (chocolate) and in the second experiment to a negative stimulus, which were self-administered electro shocks. Results indicated that participants in both conditions made more use of the stimuli when they were in the boredom group than in the neutral group. Thus, participants when bored ate more chocolate but also shocked themselves