Behavioural, psychophysical, genetic and neuroimaging investigations of boredom.

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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.