Bored, Again

The more research I do on boredom, the more I find that the literature points to boredom's correlation to all sorts of negative consequences. Whether boredom causes depression or depression causes boredom isn't too interesting to think about, given the dirth of research that can answer that question. We can say, however, that healthy and happy individuals who happen to be more prone to boredom are more likely to experience a host of mental issues. Personal characteristics such as narcissism and impulsivity are even linked to boredom-proneness.

There is some research as to how boredom affects college age individuals. The development and maturation of college age students, often called "psychosocial development," falls into seven broad categories: developing competence, managing emotions, moving through autonomy toward interdependence, developing mature interpersonal relationships, establishing identity, developing purpose, and developing integrity. With vague labels such as "developing integrity," it’s hard to be sure exactly what kind of behavior would qualify as progress in any one domain. I bring up these categories and the concept of pyschosocial development because researchers have studied boredom-proneness's effects on pyschosocial development, and there seems to be an interesting break-down by gender. More boredom-prone individuals display slower psychosocial development, and women, globally, and in what appears to be a robust effect, seem to exhibit less boredom-proneness than men, at least on the scales that are used most frequently.

I thought this finding was an interesting follow-up to my last blog entry, that touches on the role of women and the domestic sphere in the development of the concept of boredom. One study explains this result by suggesting that men need more external stimulation, but I don't think that this explains anything. My intuition, though I haven't found research on this, is that feeling bored often is related to poor introspection skills, which I believe is a relative female strength. I wonder how lifestyle differences and relative baseline levels of physical activity for males and women might affect the relative coping mechanisms for boredom that women and men develop.