MOOD, PERSONALITY, AND TASK PERFORMANCE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN BORED AND NONBORED COLLEGE STUDENTS

Boredom of a chronic nature has been largely ignored by research psychologists yet identified by social commentators as a major problem confronting teenagers and young adults today. In this study, forty chronically bored and forty rarely bored college students were identified by a self-report questionnaire and then compared on mood, personality, and task performance variables. Bored students were found to be more depressed than nonbored students on the Beck Depression Inventory, supporting a theory that boredom is a symptom of depression. On the Revised Repression-Sensitization Scale, bored students scored significantly higher than nonbored in the sensitizing direction, suggesting that they are especially sensitive to negative stimuli, rather than repressive of responses to such stimuli. On the Cattell 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire, bored students were found to be significantly more tense, affected by feelings, apprehensive, shy, and uncontrolled than nonbored students. Overall, on mood and personality measures bored students presented a picture of general distress, including mild depression, tension, and sensitivity to threatening stimuli. Bored and nonbored students were also given pencil-and-paper tasks that were either boring or interesting and compared on time worked, amount completed, percent error, and interest in tasks. Bored students were found to report significantly more boredom during tasks but, in spite of that boredom, performed no differently overall than nonbored students on the three measures of task performance. In fact, bored students reporting high levels of boredom completed far more of their tasks than nonbored students reporting high levels of boredom. Based on all the data, it is hypothesized that bored students may have some inner constraints that restrain them from taking necessary steps to escape boredom. Further, the nature of these constraints--depression, tension, shyness, and worry--are familiar ones to mental health practitioners and could potentially be alleviated by readily available treatment techniques.