New research published in Motivation and emotion suggests that boredom can lead to non-suicidal self-harm behaviors, even when positive alternatives are available. The study found that boredom increased the selection of unpleasant stimuli, such as unpleasant sounds, compared to neutral or anger-provoking scenarios.
Previous studies have demonstrated that boredom can lead to a range of negative outcomes, including self-harm, to alleviate monotony. For example, one study demonstrated that participants would increase the delivery of painful electric shocks to their bodies.
However, these previous experiments only offered participants the option of harming themselves or doing nothing at all. Therefore, it was unclear whether these behaviors would persist when individuals were instead given the opportunity to engage in positive activities.
Led by Morsal Khouwaga Yusoufzai, a research team from Maastricht University sought to fill this gap in the literature. 129 participants were recruited, with an average age of 21 years. Almost all were university students and the majority of participants were women.
The literature demonstrates that in addition to boredom, anger triggers non-suicidal self-injurious behaviors. Therefore, Yusoufzai’s team randomly assigned these participants to write about boring, anger-provoking, 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 their home to the university. In the anger-provoking condition, participants described a personal memory in which they felt angry.
During this writing task, participants had the option of listening to either a pleasant sound (birds chirping) or an unpleasant sound (pig screaming). The frequency of their choices was then measured.
Results revealed that participants experiencing boredom 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 angry and neutral conditions.
Yusoufzai and colleagues also analyzed whether personality would influence the link between boredom and non-suicidal self-harm. 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 attenuate the relationship between boredom and the choice of unpleasant stimuli.
“The current results suggest that the negative effect of boredom is not limited to situations involving only negative behavioral options. This implies that boredom can lead to non-suicidal self-harm behaviors in settings other than correctional and clinical settings, where a lack of positive behavioral options was previously thought to explain the increase in self-harm behaviors. non-suicidal,” the researchers concluded.
The study has limitations, including the use of aversive sounds as an indicator of self-harm, which does not involve the physical pain typically associated with self-harm.
The study, “It 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.
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