Eating and inflicting pain out of boredom

-Review-

Vraciu Ioan

In 2014, Havermans and his collaborators did a study on the effects that boredom has on
emotional eating and self-inflicting pain.

Boredom has been conceptualized in many different ways. For example, Leo Tolstoy defined
boredom as “the desire for desires”, Arthur Schopenhauer said “Boredom is just the reverse
side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads
to the other.”, although a more scientific conceptualization it is that boredom represents an
aversive experience of not being able to engage in a satisfying activity (Eastwood, Frischen,
Fenske, and Smilek, 2012 apud. Havermans, et al. 2015) and it is “subjectively construed as
monotonous” (Hill & Perkins, 1985, p. 237 apud. Havermans, et al. 2015).

The feeling of boredom has been linked to over eating (Hill, Weaver, & Blundell, 1991;
Stickney & Miltenberger, 1999 apud. Havermans, et al. 2015).

The fact that there is no stimulation or a monotonous stimulation is perceived as an aversive

event by the individual. The tendency is to get away from this kind of aversive event
disrupting that monotony or filling „the gap” with either a positive or a negative stimulus that
can alleviate boredom, so you either can eat more or you could self-inflict pain to get
stimulated.

In this study the researchers ran two parallel experiments in which they tested if the same
boring task could make participants to eat chocolate (Experiment 1) and also inflict pain on
themselves (Experiment 2).

Sixty participants (49 women and 11 men; the average age was 24.4 years) were recruited at
Maastricht University and were informed that they participating in a study concerning
personality and visual stimuli. They were randomly assigned to take part in either experiment
1 or 2 (30 and 30).

The participants were tested individually in two days. In both days they watched a
documentary (In Search of Memory) for 60 minutes in one of the two days (neutral condition)
and in the other day the boring condition came in to play : they had to watch a 85s scene from
the documentary , were the protagonist played tennis with one of his friends, for a whole hour.
The researchers counterbalanced the normal and boring conditions.

For the first experiment, after the participant signed a consent form, was told that s/he could
eat as much chocolate M&Ms from the candy dispenser as s/he liked. The participant was
monitored to do the task, and also all his/her gadgets (phone, watch etc.) were removed.
 Fig. 1

Figure 1 shows that the participants were more bored, frustrated, tired after watching the
boring fragment, also the participants rated this segment more boring than the neutral film.

Figure 2 shows the mean amount of M&Ms consumed by the participants in both conditions;
it’s worth mentioning that there was no difference in hunger presented by participants before
the two sessions. They consumed almost twice as much chocolate in the boring condition,
thus the findings supporting the researcher’s hypotheses, hedonic food disrupting the negative
feeling of boredom.

Fig. 2
In Experiment 2, the procedures were the same regarding the boring and neutral conditions;
however, instead of eating M&Ms, they had the option to administer electrocutaneous shocks.

They were connected to a bipolar current stimulator, with 2 electrodes attached to the non-
dominant hand. Participants were instructed that they could administer shocks between 1 and
20 mA, also they could start from 1 rise the intensity along the way.

Fig. 3

The researchers first assessed if the boring condition was indeed boring like in the first
experiment and Fig. 3 shows that it was.

The results showed that the participants shocked themselves 22.4 times when they were in the
boring condition (Figure 4), supporting the hypotheses which states that an individual will
seek for stimulation to disrupt the boring state, even if that stimulation is aversive and
unpleasant in nature.

Fig. 4
 Reference

Havermans, Remco C. et al. "Eating And Inflicting Pain Out Of Boredom". Appetite 85
(2015): 52-57. Web.