New research published in Motivation and Emotion suggests that boredom can lead to non-suicidal self-injury behaviors, even when positive alternatives are available. The study discovered that boredom increased the selection of unpleasant stimuli, such as unpleasant sounds, compared to scenarios that were neutral or induced anger.
Prior studies have demonstrated that boredom can lead to a range of negative outcomes, including self-harm, in order to alleviate monotony. For instance, one study demonstrated that participants would increase administration of painful electric shocks to their bodies.
However, these previous experiments only provided participants with the option to harm themselves or do nothing at all. Hence, it was unclear whether these behaviors would persist when individuals had the option to engage in positive activities instead.
Led by Morsal Khouwaga Yusoufzai, a team from Maastricht University research team sought to address this gap in the literature. 129 participants were recruited, who were 21 years old on average. Almost all were university students, and the majority of the participants were female.
The literature demonstrates that addition to boredom, anger has been found to elicit non-suicidal self-injury behaviors. Hence, Yusoufzai’s team randomly assigned these participants to write about boring, anger-inducing, or neutral topics.
In the boredom-inducing task, participants were asked to repeatedly write the word “Abramson”. In the neutral task, participants described how they traveled from home to university. In the anger-inducing condition, participants described a personal memory in which they felt angry.
During this writing task, the participants were provided with the option to listen to either a pleasant sound (chirping birds) or unpleasant sound (screaming pig). The frequency of their choices were then measured.
The findings revealed that participants in the boredom condition chose the unpleasant sounds more frequently than those in the other conditions, suggesting a specific link between boredom and unpleasant stimuli. Interestingly, the study found no difference in the frequency of choosing unpleasant sounds between the anger and neutral conditions.
Yusoufzai and colleagues also analysed whether personality would influence the link between boredom and non-suicidal self-injury. The history of non-suicidal self-harm behaviors and the personality trait of negative urgency (tendency to act impulsively in response to negative emotions such as boredom or stress) were measured in participants. However, these factors did not moderate the relationship between boredom and choosing unpleasant stimuli.
“The current findings suggest that the negative effect of boredom is not confined to situations with only negative behavioral options. This implies that boredom may lead to non-suicidal self-injury behavior in settings beyond penitentiary and clinical institutions, where lack of positive behavioral options were previously thought to explain the increased non-suicidal self-injury behaviors,” the researchers concluded.
The study has limitations, including the use of aversive sounds as a proxy for self-harm, which does not involve the physical pain typically associated with self-injury.
The study, “Sounds boring: the causal effect of boredom on self-administration of aversive stimuli in the presence of a positive alternative”, was authored by Morsal Khouwaga Yusoufzai, Chantal Nederkoorn, Jill Lobbestael, and Linda Vancleef.
