Agency, frustration, and the experience of boredom

Prior work shows that highly boredom prone individuals report feeling diminished levels of agency. The current study investigated the possibility that the highly boredom prone would be more sensitive (and less tolerant) to disruptions to their own agency. Participants played the video game Pong, with delays gradually introduced between their initiation of movements of the paddle and actual movements on the screen as a means of disrupting agency. In addition, participants had the option to reset the game (which also reset delays to zero) as often as they liked. State boredom ratings were negatively associated with subjective ratings of control, a proxy for agency, during game play. Frustration ratings were shown to mediate the association between state boredom and control ratings. For participants who made a minimum of two resets during game play, boredom proneness was predictive of the total number of resets, such that those higher in boredom proneness tended to reset the game more frequently. Further work is needed to determine how the relation between boredom and agency might influence the failure to launch into action that is characteristic of boredom proneness.