Self-inflicted pain out of boredom
Introduction
Boredom is considered an unpleasant emotion that arises when an individual is unable to engage in satisfying activity and attributes this to the context, which is perceived as uninteresting or lacking of stimulation (Eastwood et al., 2012). An experimental manipulation to induce feelings of boredom typically exists of offering monotonous stimulation for a prolonged time. Interruptions of the task decrease feelings of boredom, especially if the task is simple and demands little attention (Fisher, 1993). Further, asking participants to entertain themselves with their thoughts only is considered unpleasant and boring (Wilson et al., 2014). Wilson and colleagues found that their study participants even preferred aversive stimulation (i.e., an electric shock) to being left alone with their thoughts only.
The study by Wilson et al. (2014) was not aimed at studying the effect of boredom and they did not compare a stimulus-deprived condition to a stimulus-rich condition. It is therefore not possible to conclude that stimulus deprivation leads to boredom that in turn motivates people to shock themselves when given the opportunity to do so. Indeed, the participants might simply have shocked themselves because they could: out of curiosity, not out of boredom. However recently, Havermans et al. (2015) showed that when people are offered the opportunity to disrupt monotony with alternative stimulation, they are likely to do so. In their experiment, participants were randomly divided into two conditions: a neutral condition in which they watched a documentary for one hour, and a boring condition in which they had to watch one short fragment of the same documentary over and over again for one hour. In both conditions, participants had free access to either chocolate (experiment 1) or electric shocks (experiment 2). In the monotonous, boring condition, people ate more chocolate and they shocked themselves more often and with a higher intensity, compared to the respective neutral conditions. The authors concluded therefore, alike Wilson et al. (2014), that boredom is aversive to such an extent that some people even prefer negative stimuli above monotony.
There is another explanation why participants might choose to shock themselves. According to Chapman's Experiential Avoidance Model (Chapman et al., 2006), deliberate self-harm, also called non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), has the function to avoid or escape from aversive emotional experiences. NSSI refers to purposefully inflicting harm to one's body and includes behaviors like scratching, cutting, hitting or burning oneself (Whitlock et al., 2006, Claes et al., 2010). The mechanism behind NSSI is not completely clear yet: NSSI might elicit endogenous opioids, which alleviates pain and emotional distress or the physiological stimulation might serve as distraction and help to shift attention from emotional pain towards physical pain (Chapman et al., 2006). NSSI is more common in psychiatric populations, but also reported frequently in the general population (Whitlock et al., 2006, Claes et al., 2010). Among adolescence, the frequency is estimated to lie between 13% and 23% (Jacobson and Gould, 2007, Muehlenkamp et al., 2012) and among college students it was found that between 17% (Whitlock et al., 2006) and 41% (Aizenman and Jensen, 2007) reported the occurrence of at least one NSSI incident. The most important function of NSSI appears affect-regulation: people reported decreased negative affect, relief and increased positive affect directly after NSSI (Chapman et al., 2006, Klonsky, 2007, Claes et al., 2010). It seems therefore possible that in the studies of Havermans et al. (2015) and Wilson et al. (2014), voluntarily administering electric shocks might have served to cope with the negative emotional experience caused by the induction of boredom. This would imply that if another negative emotion is induced, again part of the participants would choose to administer electric shocks, in order to avoid experiencing the negative emotion.
In addition, it is expected that participants with a history of NSSI revert to painful stimulation during aversive emotions in the lab more easily. Self-administering electric shocks can be considered a proxy of NSSI behavior (Franklin et al., 2013), behavior these participants have shown before. In addition, participants with a history of NSSI are found to have higher pain thresholds (Claes et al., 2006, Hooley et al., 2010), making it likely they would self-administer electric shocks with a higher intensity.
In the present study, the two alternative explanations are tested. Participants are randomly divided between 3 conditions: a boredom condition, a sadness condition and a neutral condition. Participants will view film fragments, during which they can voluntarily choose to self-administer electric shocks. The number of the shocks within the first 15 min and within one hour will be tested. These two time periods are used in the studies of respectively Wilson et al. (2014) and Havermans et al. (2015) respectively and allow to study the effect of short and prolonged mood induction. Besides the number of shocks, the maximum intensity of the shocks that participants choose will be tested. It is hypothesized that participants in the boredom and sadness condition will self-administer more electric shocks and shocks with a higher maximum intensity, compared to the neutral condition.
Section snippets
Participants
The study was approved by the Ethical Committee of the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University. Sample size was based on a medium effect size (in Havermans et al. (2015) a large effect of the boredom manipulation was found (η2partial=0.41), but the effect size of the sadness manipulation on self-administration of shocks was unknown and therefore estimated as medium). When employing an alpha rejection criterion of 0.05 and a power of 0.80, we needed 65 participants for the
Participant characteristics
Scores on the questionnaires and demographic characteristics per condition are shown in Table 1.
Manipulation check
The three conditions appeared effective in manipulating different emotions, F(26, 108)=4.90, p<0.001, η2partial=0.500, see Fig. 1. No effects of history of NSSI on emotions was found, F(11, 53)=0.578, p=0.838, η2partial=0.107 and the interaction between condition and history of NSSI was also not significant, F(22, 108)=1.09, p=0.373, η2partial=0.181. When looking at the main effect of condition,
Discussion
The present study showed that, compared to a neutral condition, boredom significantly increased the number of voluntary, self-administered electric shocks, whereas sadness did not. In the first 15 min, the effect of boredom was only noticeable in participants with a history of NSSI. After 1 h, the effect of boredom was present in both groups, with and without a history of NSSI. Boredom also tended to increase the maximum selected intensity of the shocks in the boredom condition. Again, the
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2023, Journal of School PsychologyCitation Excerpt :Past research has shown boredom to be a powerful motivator of behaviors, both “good” and “bad”, in that boredom associated with meaning deficits results in increased prosocial intentions, ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation, and political polarization (van Tilburg & Igou, 2011, 2016, 2017). Similarly, work on attention deficits in boredom has shown that boredom and boredom proneness are related to greater restlessness and underarousal, increased gambling, increased pursuit of novel experiences—even when those experiences are negative—and with inflicting pain on oneself (Bench & Lench, 2019; Danckert & Merrifield, 2018; Havermans et al., 2015; Mercer & Eastwood, 2010; Nederkoorn et al., 2016; Wilson et al., 2014). In the school context, boredom has been associated with dropping out (Bridgeland et al., 2006), truancy (Robinson, 1975; Sommer, 1985), deviant behavior (Wasson, 1981), lower academic motivation and attainment (e.g., Goetz et al., 2014; Pekrun et al., 2010; Tze et al., 2016), and a “general disenchantment with school” (Robinson, 1975).
Boredom proneness, interoception, and emotional eating
2022, AppetiteCitation Excerpt :One study found that, on average, participants chose to willingly shock themselves ∼22 times while watching a 60-min video designed to induce boredom compared to only ∼ two times on average during a non-boring video (Havermans et al., 2015). A follow-up study found that this apparent willingness to engage in any activity, even a painful one, to escape boredom, was specific to boredom and did not occur during a sad mood condition (Nederkoorn et al., 2016). Applying the Escape Model to boredom, the desire to escape this aversive state may ultimately lead to problematic coping strategies (e.g., what Heatherton and Beaumeiser refer to as “cognitive narrowing”), disruptions in self-regulation, and ultimately, dysregulated eating.