Have you ever felt bored (Fig 1)? Ever found yourself with nothing engaging to do? Experienced a lack of interest in everything and everyone around you? Although not a pleasant state in which to find oneself, is boredom bad for health? In a rare moment of idleness one day, we pondered whether the expression ‘bored to death’ has any basis. Are people who are bored more likely to die earlier than...

People who feel bored experience that their current situation is meaningless and are motivated to reestablish a sense of meaningfulness. Building on the literature that conceptualizes social identification as source of meaningfulness, the authors tested the hypothesis that boredom increases the valuation of ingroups and devaluation of outgroups. Indeed, state boredom increased the liking of an ...

South African Journal of Occupational Therapy — Volume 41, Number 1, March 2011 ❒ 20. Barbalet JM. Boredom and social meaning. British Journal of Sociology, 1999; 50: 631-646. 21. Pavis S & Cunningham-Burley S. Male youth street culture: understanding the context of health-related behaviours. Health Education Research, 1999; 14, 583-596. 22. Scitovsky T. Boredom – an overlooked disease? Challen...

This research demonstrates the utility of automatically monitoring a student’s posture to track the affective states of boredom (low engagement) and flow (high engagement), which have been shown to influence learning. After a tutoring session with AutoTutor, the affective states of the student were rated by the learner, a peer, and two trained judges. Our results indicated that the affective st...

The role that affective states play in learning was investigated from the perspective of a constructivist learning framework. We observed six different affect states (frustration, boredom, flow, confusion, eureka and neutral) that potentially occur during the process of learning introductory computer literacy with AutoTutor, an intelligent tutoring system with tutorial dialogue in natural langu...