There's a New Type of Boredom, and Everyone Is Feeling It
There's a New Type of Boredom, and Everyone Is Feeling It
Complaining of boredom? You might want to be more specific.According to new research, there are no fewer than five types of boredom — one more than previously theorized. This new type of boredom is marked by a strong strain of apathy, psychologists reported in the November issue of the journal Motivation and Emotion.
"Of particular concern is the relative frequency of apathetic boredom observed in the present research," lead psychologist Thomas Goetz of the University of Konstanz in Germany and his colleagues wrote. Among high-school students studied, they found, apathetic boredom made up 36% of their boredom experiences.
Types of Boredom
Boredom is ubiquitous, but relatively rarely studied compared with other emotions such as anger or happiness. That's likely because boredom is inconspicuous and quiet — it doesn't manifest with yelling fits or beaming grins. The emotion does, however, matter for healthand well-being. Studies have linked high rates of boredom with drug and alcohol use, stress and school truancy and dropping out.
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In the 1930s, psychologists theorized that boredom might be
multifaceted and that there were different types of boredom. The idea
didn't get much traction until decades later, but in 2006, Goetz and his
colleagues asked people to report times when they felt bored. They
found that people did indeed remember feeling boredom in different ways.The findings led Goetz and his colleagues to propose four types of boredom, defined by the level of emotional arousal a person felt, from dull and slothful to restless and irritable, and by the positive and negative emotions they experienced while feeling bored.
The first type, indifferent boredom, was defined as a low state of arousal and slightly positive emotions, on balance. The indifferently bored feel relaxed and fatigued-but-cheerful. They are generally indifferent to the world and want to withdraw.
The second type, calibrating boredom, is marked by slightly higher arousal and slightly negative emotions. People in this state want to do something, but they don't know what. Their thoughts may wander, but they aren't actively searching for alternatives to the dullness.
Searching boredom, the third type, is marked by much more active looking for something to do. People experiencing searching boredom are more emotionally aroused and feel more negative than the first two types. They feel restless and think specifically of hobbies or activities they'd prefer to be doing.
The final type of boredom Goetz and his colleagues posited was reactant boredom, easily the most negative of the bunch. People in this state feel very unhappy, even angry or aggressive. Imagine being trapped in a lecture hall listening to someone drone on about a dull topic for hours on end. That antsy desire to escape illustrates reactant boredom.
Surprise Boredom
But these boredom types were based on qualitative musings by people recalling their emotional states, a method that can introduce bias. To shore up their findings, Goetz and his colleagues turned to a more rigorous study. They equipped 63 German university students and 80 German high-school students with handheld personal digital assistants. These PDAs were programmed to chime randomly six times per day, prompting the participant to answer a series of questions about what they were doing and how they were feeling that moment. If they reported boredom, the participants were asked about how it felt to be bored.The findings confirmed the existence of the four boredom types Goetz and his colleagues originally proposed. But there was a surprise: a fifth boredom type the researchers hadn't anticipated that they have dubbed "apathetic boredom."
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