Mapping the embodied experience of boredom

Emotional states often manifest physically, with many emotions being associated with specific patterns of bodily activation. Within this embodied account of affective experience, boredom has yet to be examined. Boredom proneness has been associated with alexithymia and elevated attention to interoceptive signals. Given these links, we explored how individuals represent the feeling of boredom in an embodied way. Participants viewed silhouettes and were asked to shade regions associated with a felt increase or decrease in activity with respect to a variety of emotions. We replicated past work using this tool for standard classes of emotion. For boredom, average bodily maps showed only sparse patterns of either activation or deactivation. Exploratory analyses then characterized the boredom responses into four separate profiles: Activation, Deactivation, Mixed Activation, and Low Activation. Individual differences in either boredom proneness or alexithymia were not strong predictors of membership to any profile, with the exception that alexithymia significantly negatively predicted membership to the Low Activation profile. These findings suggest that under the current task and aggregation strategy, boredom shows low consistency and sparse mean maps, which may in part explain why the trait is associated with restlessness and agitation, perhaps as a function of challenges in representing and responding to such a diffuse state.