Behavioural, psychophysical, genetic and neuroimaging investigations of boredom.

无聊是一种无处不在的认知-情感体验。无聊与无数消极的情感状态(如焦虑、攻击性)和次优行为(如冲动增加/寻求感觉、上瘾行为)密切相关，无聊显然是一种需要密切研究关注的重要人类体验。我们将无聊定义为一种激进的不满意状态，在这种状态下，个人有动机参与到他们的环境中，但所有这样做的尝试都失败了。在过去的授权期内，我们发现那些厌烦倾向高的人在持续的注意力任务中表现不佳，自我控制水平较低，并表现出生理变化(即心率和皮肤电导水平)，表明无法有效地参与任务。我们还使用功能核磁共振显示，当无聊时，大脑中被称为岛叶皮质的特定部分下调。目前的提议将这项工作扩展到四个方向：首先，行为研究将在探索无聊和执行功能之间的关系之前，复制无聊和注意力匮乏之间的联系。执行功能是那些我们怀疑高度无聊倾向的个体缺乏的更高水平的行为，如抽象推理、自我调节、抑制性控制等。我们的第二个重点将比我们之前使用心率变异性测量方法更详细地探索无聊的心理生理学特征。先前的研究表明，心率变异性水平较低与执行功能任务表现不佳有关。我们预计，容易感到无聊的人会表现出较低的心率变异性。第三个研究重点将探索基因对自我控制、自我调节和无聊的影响。这是建立在最近的一项合作基础上的，在该合作中，我们研究了所谓觅食基因的表型与无聊之间的联系。最后，我们计划使用功能神经成像来研究无聊随着时间推移的动态变化。我们预计，岛叶皮质活动的调节将跟踪自我报告无聊的变化，以响应任务中信息变化速度的差异(即，变化速度低将与岛叶的下调相关，反之亦然)。理解无聊对一系列基础科学问题有着重要的影响，从理解注意力的运用到决策和行为的最佳控制。从实践的角度来看，这项工作对精度要求很高但环境单调的应用环境(如空中交通管制)具有影响。最后，这些研究将为理解一系列普遍存在无聊的心理和神经状况提供重要的见解。

Boredom is a ubiquitous and consequential cognitive-affective experience. Strongly associated with myriad negative affective states (e.g., anxiety, aggression) and suboptimal behaviours (e.g., increased impulsivity/sensation seeking, addictive behaviours), boredom is clearly an important human experience that demands close research attention. We define boredom as an aggressively dissatisfying state in which the individual is motivated to engage in their environment, but all attempts to do so fail. In the past granting period we showed that those high in boredom proneness demonstrate poor performance on sustained attention tasks, have lower levels of self-control and demonstrate physiological changes (i.e., in heart rate and skin conductance levels) indicative of a failure to efficiently engage with a task. We also used functional MRI to show that when bored a particular part of the brain known as the insular cortex is down-regulated. The current proposal expands this work in four directions: first, behavioural studies will replicate the association between boredom and impoverished attention before exploring the relationship between boredom and executive functions. Executive functions are those higher level behaviours such as abstract reasoning, self-regulation, inhibitory control, etc. that we suspect are deficient in highly boredom prone individuals. Our second focus will explore the psychophysiological signature of boredom in more detail than we have previously using measures of heart rate variability. Previous research has shown that lower levels of heart rate variability are associated with poor performance on executive function tasks. We expect that highly boredom prone individuals will present with lower heart rate variability. The third research focus will explore genetic influences on self-control, self-regulation and boredom. This builds on a recent collaboration in which we examined the association between phenotypes of the so-called foraging gene and boredom. Finally, we plan to using functional neuroimaging to examine the dynamics of boredom over time. We expect that modulation of activity in the insular cortex will track changes in self-reported boredom in response to differences in the rate of change of information in a task (i.e., a low rate of change will be associated with down-regulation of the insula and vice versa). Understanding boredom has important consequences for a broad range of basic science questions ranging from the understanding of attention is deployed to decision making and the optimal control of behaviour. From a practical point of view, this work has implications for applied settings in which accuracy demands are high but the environment is monotonous (e.g., air traffic control). Finally, these studies will have important insights for understanding a range of psychological and neurological conditions in which boredom is prevalent.