Boredom Practical consequences and a theory.pdf

Acta Psychologica 49 (1981) 53-82 North-Holland Publishing Company

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BOREDOM: PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES AND A THEORY *

James F. OHANLON Traffic Research Centre, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Accepted October 1980

Boredom is defined as a unique psychophysiological state possessing interrelated and insepa- rable emotional, motivational, perceptual and cognitive concomitants. Practical consequences of boredom are reviewed, including diminished performance efficiency, general life satisfaction and health. Finally, the outline of a theoretical model is presented.

Introduction

Boredom is an ill-defined scientific concept. Previous definitions of boredom (or equivalent terms in languages other than English) are largely phenomenological descriptions of subjective concomitants (Bar- mack 1937; Bartenwerfer 1957; Bartley and Chute 1947; Gewitz 1964; Gubser 1968; Haider 1962; McBain 1970; Myers 1972; Welford 1968). Rather than belabor the obvious difficulties of applying phenomenological definitions for relating physical causes, psychophysiological mediating mechanisms and behavioral effects, we shall turn to points of general agreement regarding where boredom occurs and how it may be recognized.

* The substance of this paper was presented upon the authors assumption of the position of Bijzonder Hoogleraar in de Verkeerskunde (Special Professor, Traffic Science) at the Rijks- universiteit Groningen (Groningen, The Netherlands, November 11, 1980). Thanks are given to the Rector Magniticus, Prof. Dr. J. Borgman, and the administration of the University for providing this opportunity and to the Noordelijk Technisch Wegenbouwcentrum (Ir. 0. Sietze- ma, Director) for providing the professorial chair. The author is further indebted to Prof. Dr. J.A. Michon, Prof. Dr. A.F. Sanders and L.C. OHanlon for indispensible critical advice.

Requests for reprints should be sent to James F. OHanlon, Traffic Research Centre, Univer- sity of Groningen, Kerklaan 30,975O AA Haren, The Netherlands.

0001-6918/8 l/0000-0000/$02.75 0 1981 North-Holland

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J.F. OHanlon /Boredom: practical consequences and a theory

Boredom occurs as a reaction to task situations where the pattern of sensory stimulation is nearly constant or highly repetitious, and particularly when required motoric responding is contingent upon information contained within the monotonous stimulation. Degrees of boredom reported by different individuals in the same monotonous working environment vary greatly. An emotional component of boredom includes aversion to monotonous elements of the situation that are identified by the individual as the source of the feeling. Simultaneously, the individual is motivated to change the environment, vary his activity or escape the situation altogether. Boredom can occur within minutes after the commencement of repetitive activity, particularly if that activity has been frequently experienced in the past. Boredom is highly situation-specific and is immediately reversible when the situation changes to any large extent.

As shall be shown, performance deficits indicating perceptual, cognitive and motoric impairment have been frequently observed in situations that produce the emotional and motivational components of boredom. The former, like the latter, begin to occur within a very short period of exposure and are quickly reversed by situational change. A few researchers (e.g. Bartenwerfer 1957; Gilbertova and Glivicky 1967, and below) have found relationships between these objective and subjective changes in persons performing monotonous work and have gone on to suggest that all are really manifestations of the same process.

We shall also see that chronic boredom has been cited as the cause of serious social and medical problems. Clearly it is absurd to explore this possibility while continuing to define boredom as a wholly subjective phenomenon.

At this point, let us accept a working definition of boredom as a unique psychophysiological state that is somehow produced by prolonged exposure to monotonous stimulation. The classical emotional and.motivational concomitants of boredom are accepted merely as signs of the occurrence of that state. In the section that follows, other psychological concomitants of boredom are identified from performance changes, either by coincidence with the classic signs or by following the same rapid course of development during monotonous tasks and immediate reversal with situational change. Observed social and medical con-

J.F. OHanlon /Boredom: practical consequences and a theory 55

sequences of chronic boredom are also reviewed as these may be related to the repeated elicitation of the acute psychophysiological state and indicate that it constitutes one of the conditions of disturbed homeostasis known commonly as stress.

The review is mainly restricted to studies of repetitive task effects in actual or realistically simulated working environments. Boredom was first recognized in actual working situations as a topic worthy of scientific inquiry (Munsterberg 19 13) and the stimulus for further laboratory investigation has come mainly from the field (see below). More- over, as Hockey (1979) has recently observed, results of laboratory studies involving the short-term exposure of inexperienced subjects to simple repetitive work (his examples, monitoring and serial reaction time tasks) are difficult to extrapolate to everyday monotonous working situations. According to him, laboratory results may yield a very pretty theory that doesnt actually help anyone to cope with stress.

Hopefully, the emphasis on practical aspects of boredom will lead to a more pragmatic concept. An attempt to integrate such findings with current concepts of arousal, effort and stress is made in the final section. A hypothetical outline of the psychophysiological state emerges. This concept of boredom is offered here as its final definition; less succinct than the predecessors, but perhaps of greater heuristic, explan- atory and predictive value.

Practical effects of monotonous work

Reports of monotonous work effects can be categorized as showing (1) diminished performance efficiency with respect to an initial level or some imposed criterion, (2) a pervasive attitude of dissatisfaction with the working environment, and (3) pathological changes. These distinc- tions mainly reflect the way separate effects have been studied in the past. However, the respective effects are often observed in similar environments and for that reason may be considered as arising from the same physical and psychophysiological sources.

Efficiency

If there are reliable perceptual and cognitive concomitants of boredom, these should appear in monotonous tasks as either a gradual perfor-

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mance decrement or as a sustained low level of performance efficiency, depending upon how rapidly the effects of monotonous sensory stimulation overcome the individuals effort to resist them, if indeed he makes.any effort at all. Evidence exists for both types of impairment in several types of monotonous tasks: mechanical assembly, inspection and monitoring and continuous manual control.

Mechanical assembly The results of early industrial studies seemed unequivocal: the individual unit-output rates of many assembly workers followed a predictable time course; high initially, then much depressed, and finally elevated again before the end of a spell of continuous work (Wyatt et al. 1929). The magnitude of boredom reported by these workers was inversely related to their work output. Unfortunately, several modern studies have failed to replicate these results (Smith 1953; Hulin and Blood 1968; Murrell 197 1). No systematic and parallel patterns of work output and boredom were found. On the other hand, in simulated industrial assembly tasks a substantial increase in output variability has been observed after about one hours time (Bujas and Petz 1954; Hartnett 1967; Manenica and Corlett 1977; Murrell 1962, 197 1; Murrell and Forsaith 1963). In all cases, this was attributed to the increasing occurrence of very long work cycle times, followed by a catch-up effort and short cycle times.

Murrell (197 1) believed that output decrements were found in the early field studies, but not in later ones, because assembly tasks were formerly performed over longer continuous periods of time. In modern British industry, he observed that workers exercised their option of structuring their working regimes to achieve particular quota without prolonged periods of continuous work. Nachreiner (1977) found that German workers did the same and showed no decrement. On the other hand, Japanese and Russian assembly workers who were required to perform continuously for 1.5-2.0 hour periods between pauses, did show performance decrements (Zolina et al. 1973; Kishida 1973).

Branton ( 1970) reported a decrement in automatized motor skill proficiency leading to 427 injuries among 180 lathe, punch press and drill operators over a two year period. These workers continuously operated their machines in a rapid and repetitive manner during 105- 135 minute periods between rest pauses. Branton analyzed the accident frequency as a function of each continuous working period over the


day to show that accidents increased progressively during each working period and fell after every pause. A closer look at the individual performance of lathe operators revealed the probable immediate cause: a time-related increase in the frequency of ballistic hand movements that were either mistimed or misdirected. In Brantons view, motor repetition somehow affected the workers in a manner interrupting the normal proprioceptive feedback which guided the control of ballistic hand movements. When this occurred the workers hand was not in the appropriate place at the appropriate time. If his hand was then juxta- posed with moving machinery, the accident occurred. Similar results and conclusions were obtained in a punch-press simulation study by McKelvey et al. ( 1973)

Haider (1963) used the secondary task approach to show that assembly-line workers grow increasingly insensitive to task-irrelevant information as they perform machine-paced tasks over prolonged periods. The workers were engaged in assembly-line operations and responded as rapidly as possible by depressing a foot pedal whenever small lamps over their work stations were briefly illuminated. The workers reactions in the secondary task grew progressively slower as the day wore on, although partial recovery occurred after short pauses and nearly complete recovery after the longer midday pause. Self- paced assemblers showed no deterioration in secondary task performance over time. Haider attributed the performance decrement to a loss of worker vigilance, and felt that the results implied a general loss of capability to respond to all peripheral information sources, including those relevant to machine operation and safety.

Inspection and monitoring A decrement in efficiency has also been found in monotonous tasks requiring little or no motor output, but instead continuous attention, perceptual discrimination and decision making. Again, Wyatts group (Wyatt and Landon 1932) conducted the pioneering research. They found that the fault-detection performance consistently followed the same time course over several hours of continuous work; mediocre for the first 15 minutes; very much better during the next quarter hour; then progressively worse until shortly before the end of the work period when a relatively high level of efficiency was briefly regained. In recent times, the decrement was again observed in actual industrial inspection (Chapman and Sinclair 1975; Fox and Embrey 1972; Saito

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et al. 1972) and in laboratory simulation of that task (Badalamente and Ayoub 1969; Ehlers 1972).

Perhaps the most famous decrement of detection efficiency was initially revealed in an anonomous R.A.F. report during the early stages of the Second World War (later cited by Baker 1962). This survey of contacts reported by airborne radarmen astonished authorities by revealing a substantial drop in hostile U-boat and aircraft sightings as a function of the operators times on watch. Assuming that the frequency of contacts was actually constant over time, the declining frequency of sightings indicated that the radarmen were missing at least about 50% of the targets (Baker 1962). The R.A.F. Costa1 Command commissioned N.H. Mackworth at Cambridge to investigate this problem. Mackworths (1950) studies involved both simulation and abstraction of the radar- mans task, the latter leading to his development of the now famous clock test which has provided the experimental paradigm for literally hundreds of laboratory studies on human vigilance (reviews by Davies and Tune 1970; Mackie 1977; J.F. Mackworth 1969; Stroh 1971).

The major contribution of Mackworth and his followers was to show that a decline in signal detection efficiency can occur over time on task when the aperiodic and infrequent signals differ little perceptually from monotonous background stimuli, or noise. Sometimes, however, the measured performance decrement was slight and task modifications that reduced its monotony or increased the incentive for efficient performance abolished the decrement entirely. This has encouraged several authors to believe that the so-called vigilance decrement may be a laboratory artifact or at least not relevant to practical monitoring problems in todays more complex surveillance systems (Kibler 1965; Nach- reiner 1977 ; Smith and Luccaccini 1969; Teichner 1972).

But the decrement has been found in more or less realistic task simulations of radar target detection (Caille et al. 1965; Beatty et al. 1974; OHanlon and Beatty 1976, 1977; OHanlon et al. 1977), radar naviga- tion and collision avoidance (Schmidtke 1966), air traffic control (Thackray et al. 1977, 1979), train control at a terminal station (Reh- berg and Neumann 1969) and television surveillance within a prison (Tickner and Poulton 1973). No decrement was observed in one ship- board study of radarman and sonorman target detection efficiency, but instead, occasional periods of operationally unacceptable performance lasting the entire watch period (Elliot 1960). No unusual situational or individual factor could be identified to account for the sustained depression of operator vigilance.


For practical purposes it matters not at all whether the vigilance decrement is due to an attentional, perceptual or motivational deficit. Ultimately it does not even matter whether the rapidity or magnitude of the decrement is large or small. The fact is that all surveillance systems are designed to be operated by monitors performing above some criterion level of efficiency. Maximum, sustained vigilance is demanded in a few cases (from the airplane pilot) and something less in all others. No report of sustained maximum efficiency by a group of operators in any realistic monitoring task has ever been offered, but there are ample reports to the contrary. The practical question is whether normal levels of vigilance suffice to achieve the particular performance criterion. The more fundamental question is why task monitoring should reduce ability and/or motivation to perform at a maximal level.

There has been a tendency among vigilance researchers to treat attentional and motivational deficits as separate issues. Yet, in what appears as the only attempt to relate attentional loss to feelings of boredom, a relationship emerged. Thackray et al. (1977) distinguished groups of subjects on the basis of boredom experienced during a very realistic and perceptually complex air traffic control task. High boredom accompanied a performance decrement, and low boredom, no decrement. Nonetheless, the high boredom group also claimed that they had exerted considerably more effort to perform well than the others. These results indicate that feelings of boredom accompany deficient performances in monitoring tasks (see also Davies and Tune 1970: 11). More importantly, they suggest that the bored individual is not pas- sively resigned to performing badly. Instead, he may actively attempt to do better, more indeed than the individual who is not bored and is more efficient.

Continuous manual control Operating an airplane under instrument flight conditions, or an automobile over long highways at night can be highly monotonous activities. If the continuous perceptual-cognitive motor process is somehow compromised by these monotonous activities, one would expect to see a decline in performance efficiency resembling that observed in other environments where work is repetitious. The first clue that this occurs in pilots again emerged from British wartime research in a Cambridge laboratory.

Bartlett (1943) simulated instrument flight conditions, requiring the

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pilots coordinated hand, foot and eye movements to maintain a pre- scribed altitude and heading in response to visual information displayed from several sources. The test was continuous and normally lasted two hours. A highly reliable pattern of performance deterioration began within the first half hour and progressed rapidly until it reached dra- matic proportions. Tracking error increased without the pilots aware- ness. Coordinated timing of sequential limb movements was disturbed. Responding to the integration of simultaneous information from several sources was replaced by serial responding to separate sources. Peripheral information sources were selectively ignored or forgotten. Short periods occurred during which the pilot did nothing. Irrelevant stimuli caused greater distraction from the task of flying. And finally, the pilots expressed intense feelings of irritability.

Bartlett entitled the syndrome skill fatigue according to the fashion of the day. However, it is a peculiar kind of fatigue that arises so rapidly in presumably normal individuals during physically light work and disappears as quickly after work termination. (If the pilots showed residual effects, Bartlett uncharacteristically neglected to men- tion it.) Moreover, the rapid loss of efficiency and the intense aversion to the task, of skill fatigue, resemble the findings reported from the equally classic continuous tracking experiments of Barmack (1937), and repetitive work experiments of Karsten (1928), where these changes were said to accompany boredom and ~berdttigung (satiation), respectively.

Bartletts experiments have never been completely replicated but recently Stave (1977) reported similar results from five helicopter pilots who repeatedly undertook 3- to 6-hour missions in a modern simulator. Again the pilots subjective feelings of fatigue and irritability mounted over time, but surprisingly, faster in shorter missions. With some nota- ble exceptions where something like skill fatigue occurred in a relatively short time, the pilots average performance did not deteriorate. This was attributed to progressively increasing effort which was obvious from the pilots incidental behavior. Yet the pilots occasionally experienced lapses, or transient periods of inattention, when they simply did nothing and allowed their tracking error to mount. The frequency of lapses was strongly correlated with expressed feeling of fatigue; and was likewise greater during the shorter missions. Rest periods lasting only one minute forestalled the further occurrence of lapses. Stave believed that lapses occurred as an effect of continuous attention to the

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monotonous task: also that rest pauses were effective because they relieved the attentional demand, the necessity for effort, and also boredom.

A deterioration in lateral road tracking performance also occurs in prolonged driving simulations (Bartenwerfer 1957; Dureman and BodCn 1972; Ellingstadt and Heimstra 1970; Heimstra 1970; Mast et al. 1966; Suhr 1956; Sussman and Morris 1970), as well in the actual task (Caille and Bassano 1976; Forbes et al. 1958; Lauer and Suhr 1959; Mackie and Miller 1978; OHanlon and Kelley 1977; Riemersma et al. 1977; Suggerman and Cozad 1972). The performance decrement often began within the first half hour of driving for subjects who were not tired beforehand; further deterioration usually followed a linear course; and a short rest pause was enough to restore tracking efficiency temporarily to something approaching_ the initial level (e.g. Sussman and Morris 1970; and Riemersma et al. 1977). Moreover, after one hour of simulated driving it was possible to diminish the rate of tracking decrement merely by making the subject drive faster. Slower driving had the op- posite effect (Bartenwerfer 1957). In the real environment comparable groups driving at night over different rural highways showed a loss of tracking efficiency in inverse relationship to the traffic density (OHan- lon and Kelley 1977). When the density was high and constant no performance change occurred over five hours of continuous driving. But great deterioration in a shorter period of time occurred when traffic density was initially high but gradually fell thereafter. Drivers were capable of operating without performance decrement for as long as 12 hours in daytime, city traffic (Brown et al. 1967; Brown et al. 1966). So it seems that the more monotonous sensory stimulation provided by the stimulator and night driving environments, and not simply repetitious motor activity, was responsible for the rapid performance decrement.

Satisfaction

The, classic emotional and motivational concomitants of boredom might easily lead one to expect the generalization of aversive feelings from a monotonous task to the entire .working environment. Accepting such a possibility, social scientists have sought to determine whether repeated exposures to monotonous tasks create pervasive attitudes, indicating personality changes, that affect behavior outside of the tasks confines.


The monotonous situations thus considered have been mass production industry and school.

Industry Among assembly workers interviewed by Wyatt et al. (1929) about 26% said that they were virtually never bored whereas 15% were nearly always .bored in their jobs. Thirty years later, surveys of similar occupational groups placed the percent of very bored workers at between 20% and 50% (Cox et al. 1953; Kornhauser 1965; Smith 1953, 1955; Turner and Miclette 1962; Walker and Guest 1952). The greater frequencies were found in the most routine and machine-paced tasks, such as automobile assembly (Walker and Guest 1952), and the lower frequencies, in high-technology industry where assembly was self-paced and required greater skill for evolving products that were judged of greater impor- tance for achieving national goals (Turner and Miclette 1962).

Realizing that many workers experienced boredom, and some to what seemed agonizing degrees, the scientists set out to determine whether absenteeism was used by workers as an escape from boredom. An early report of a direct relationship (Walker and Guest 1952) was soon challenged by failures to find any relationship (Kilbridge 196 1; MacKinny et al. 1962). Two subsequent surveys have provided contra- dictory findings (Turner and Lawrence 1965; Hackman and ,Lawler 1971). Most Western authorities have now concluded that it is next to impossible to show a relationship between boredom and absenteeism owing to the natural confounding of boredom with other causes of absenteeism.

Japanese scientists, on the other hand, have been highly successful in showing how task repetitiveness, assumed to directly influence boredom, affects absenteeism. For example, Saito (1973; Saito et aZ. 1972; Saito and Endo 1977) demonstrated that absenteeism was greater in machine-paced assembly than when the same work was done at the workers chosen pace; and that absenteeism rose in machine-paced work (assembly and inspection) as work cycle time diminished. Industry norms for absenteeism are lower in Japan than in developed Western nations (Saito et al. 1972). This implies that fewer factors contribute substantially to absenteeism in Japan. The effect of boredom may be more apparent for that reason.

Lately more attention has been devoted to the relationship between boredom as related specifically to the performance of a monotonous

J.F. OHanlon /Boredom: pmctical consequences and a theory 63

task, and more general dissatisfaction with the occupation. Garde11 (197 1) determined that about 20% of male machine-paced workers in a Swedish light engineering firm found their tasks too monotonous. Among this group, only 20% said they were happy with their jobs, as compared to 70% of their colleagues who found the same work interesting. More importantly, those who perceived the work as being too monotonous were significantly less satisfied with life in general, possessed greater doubts regarding their prestige, experienced greater anxiety, and complained more about vague medical problems.

Caplan et ds (1975) survey of 2010 American male workers from 23 occupation groups yielded the following major results.

(1) Boredom was strongly related to overall job dissatisfaction (r = 0.63).

(2) Boredom varied in an expected manner between occupational groups (e.g. assembly-line workers were much more bored than phy- sicians). Still, only 42% of the variance in reported boredom was attributable to occupational differences. The combined variance of boredom within all occupational groups was the greater component (58%).

(3) Comparing average boredom scores across all groups, boredom was very strongly related to group job dissatisfaction (r = 0.85), depression (0.68) and complaints about general health (0.62).

Cox and Mackay (in press) demonstrated that English women workers seem able to dissociate unpleasant boredom experienced from the routine performance of highly repetitious assembly-line tasks, and satisfaction gained from other factors in the working environment (mostly social contacts). The overall judgment of job pleasantness was, in this study, independent of reported boredom. A French survey (Teiger and Laville 1978) of female electronics and garment assemblers also found no apparent relationship between boredom and overall job satisfaction. The majority .of the workers disliked their jobs, but mainly because of poor social relationships with peers or supervisors.

The age of the worker also determines his tolerance for monotonous work. In seven separate surveys reported boredom, job dissatisfaction or both, diminished as a function of age for both male and female assembly-line workers (Cox and Mackay in press; Garde11 1971; Hill 1975; Kornhauser 1965; Nachreiner 1978; Smith 1955; Stanger 1975).


Because none of these surveys was longitudinal, it is unknown whether the relationship between age and boredom was due to adaptation, or merely the selective attrition of less tolerant individuals who leave the monotonous working environment at their earliest opportunity.

School In Gjesqes (1977) survey of Norwegian sixth graders (1 l-l 2 years old), ratings of dissatisfaction with school were strongly correlated with feelings of boredom at school (to virtually the same degree as reported by Caplan et al. for industrial workers). The childrens boredom was not related to their intelligence or motivation to avoid scholastic failure.

Boredom in British primary (Fogelman 1976) and secondary (Robin- son 1975) school students adversely affected their satisfaction, achieve- ment and behavior in a variety of ways. Chronically bored students were under-achievers, in spite of the fact that they were little different from other students with respect to intelligence. Teachers ratings of the non-academic classroom behavior of bored students were considerably worse than ratings of the others. In secondary schools, bored students truancy and drop-out rates were approximately double those of the others. Not surprisingly, the teachers of bored secondary school students were very pessimistic regarding the students further educational development, and evinced little sympathy for them. The teachers described the bored students as more hostile and disinterested. So one can reasonably suppose that less understanding teachers reciprocated in kind and thereby further diminished the students satisfaction with school. Viewed in this manner, the greater truancy and early final departures of the bored students from school appear to be rational avoidance reactions to an unrewarding, irrelevant, punitive and, in short, stressful environment.

Health

Behavioral evidence suggests that boredom arises from some disturbance in normal brain functions that may occur within and extend beyond the spatial and temporal confines of a monotonous task. If this is true one might expect to fiid an unusually high evidence of psychiatric and psychosomatic disease among populations of workers who have performed very repetitive tasks over periods of years. This expec-


tation was partially confirmed by the results of mental and physical health surveys.

Mental All of the attempts by social and medical scientists to find a link between occupational boredom and poor mental health have suffered from serious methodological deficiences (Kasl 1978). Every epidemiological survey has employed the cross-sectional or weakest (Kasl 1978: 48) design. The designation of target and control groups was usually made on the basis of job-title, and never upon objectively measured differences in exposure to the supposed pathogen, task repetition. The criteria for assessing mental health were either the investigators own invention (Caplan et al. 1975; Kornhauser 1965; Garde11 1971) or taken from short psychiatric screening inventories that were not standardized for the target population (Roman and Trite 1972; Siassi et al. 1974). Control groups were never matched to target groups with respect to personal factors known to affect occupational boredom, and. occasionally neither sample, closely resembled the occupational population (again, Roman and Trite 1972; and Siassi et al. 1974).

About the best that can be said from the accumulated evidence is that within the same monotonous occupation, workers who complain of chronic boredom tend to be more neurotic and otherwise less men- tally healthy than those who do not (Garde11 197 1; Hill 1975; Korn- hauser 1965; Nachreiner and Ernst 1978). They tend strongly to harbor feelings of resentment and repressed hostility (Broadbent 1979; Korn- hauser 1965); and more weakly, feelings of depression (Caplan et al. 1975) or anxiety (Garde11 1971). Whether these factors contribute to, or arise from, chronic boredom is presently unknown.

Another, frightening, effect of prolonged engagement in repetitive assembly work was recently suggested by Martin et al. (1980). They surveyed a group of predominantly female Swiss watch makers who had worked for various periods at the same repetitive tasks. A significant inverse correlation (-0.55) was found between a measure of the workers verbal intelligence (from the Paragraph Completion Test) and their tenure at the boring job. No significant correlation was found between test scores and the workers ages, or between ages and terms at present jobs. The possibility exists that monotonous work somehow diminished the workers intelligence. Yet, because this study also followed the deficient cross-sectional design, the authors could not discount the possi-


bility that the result simply arose from selective attrition of more intel- ligent workers.

Physical The first and largest survey (Samilova 197 1) compared morbidity patterns between Russian women who were either employed in repetitive machine-paced occupations (punch-press operation, fabric cutting, and bottling) or in less repetitive, self-paced occupations (packing and up- holstering). The former workers suffered:

( 1) 3-5 times the incidence of cardiovascular disease; (2) 4-7 times the incidence of peripheral neurological disorders (neu-

ritis and radiculitis); (3) twice the incidence of gastritis; (4) 2-3 times the incidence of diseases affecting the muscles, tendons

and joints; and (5) were absent from work 3-5 times as often for medical reasons.

In Australia, Ferguson (1973) conducted a survey of the health of telegraphists who had, among other things, complained about extreme task monotony. He compared the telegraphists with clerical, maintenance and supervisoral personnel in the same office. In the busiest office (Syd- ney) the telegraphists were more likely to be neurotic and suffered more frequently from asthma, bronchitus, trunk myalgia, exaggerated tendon reflexes, .hand tremor, regular drinking and excessive smoking.

Among a group of French assemblers, Laville and Teiger (1975) found that approximately three-quarters experienced occasional hys- terical reactions (crise de nerves et envanouissements). The same number suffered from chronic gastritis and/or vomiting. Half experienced regular insomnia and nearly all occasionally manifested some neuropsychiatric disorder, such as hypersensitivity to noise and light, extreme emotional lability and anxiety. Though no control group was studied, the workers morbidity pattern can be considered as highly aberrant with respect to those in most normal working situations.

Nerell (1975) reported that Swedish mill workers having physically constraining and repetitious jobs were severely afflicted with peptic ulcers and gastritis. Overall, one-third of the workers and as many as 60% on one task category were receiving treatment for these diseases at the time of the survey.


The probable cause for these workers ill-health was revealed in a companion attitude survey (Nilsson 1975). Mill workers complained that task monotony was a stress factor; 18% to a great degree and another 29% to some degree. Workers in the line of process control who possessed the greatest skill and responsibility (i.e. edgermen, sawers and trimmer-graders) were in nearly unanimous accord regarding the adverse effects of monotony. They said that repetitive work with cycle times of five seconds or less produced somnolescence, distracting day-dreams and sometimes even hallucinations. The need to exert effort in over- coming these aberrations was deemed responsible for commonly expressed feelings of mental fatigue and strain among these workers.

A follow-up empirical study was conducted using as subjects two groups of mill workers; the high-risk process controllers and the low- risk maintenance men (Johansson et al. 1978). The majority (57%) of the process controllers said they were chronically bored and half dreaded the beginning of each days work. None of the maintenance men shared these feelings. Measured adrenaline excretion rates for process controllers at work were twice the resting values, inversely related to feelings of calmness and well-being and inversely related to the work cycle. Noradrenaline excretion rates were elevated to a similar extent, but directly related to feelings of irritation and the degree of imposed physical constraint. The excretion rates of the hormones for the maintenance men were not elevated by their work.

Conclusions from the literature

Deficient performance has often been observed in monotonous tasks that continue without interruption for an hour or more. When those tasks involved repetitive motoric activity, the impairment took the form of occasional slow reactions that either increased output variability or led to timing errors. The latter were identified a.s a cause of industrial accidents (Branton 1970). Tracking performance deteriorated during continuous manual control tasks, particularly when the operators visual stimulation was limited to that providing the information required for completing the task. Part of this impairment was attributed to transient attentional lapses causing interruptions in the operators motoric output. Finally, fault or target detection performance was found to deteriorate over time in task, or to remain stable at a low level of efficiency, in more than a dozen realistic versions of inspection on


monitoring tasks. All types of decrement were reversed by short pauses in the working regimen.

Perceptual and/or cognitive impairment is implied by performance changes in monotonous tasks. Critical information is either not perceived or, if perceived, fails to rapidly and reliably elicit the required motor reaction. Rehberg and Neumanns (1969) results indicated that both impairments may occur together: both the variability of detection latencies, and of the times to expedite decisions based upon detections, increased in parallel in the most monotonous version of their train controlling task.

From evidence discussed in the following section, there is reason to believe that monotonous sensory stimulation depresses the perceptual and cognitive functions of the cerebral cortex. This could account for the performance failures by individuals in monotonous tasks, but not for their subjective reactions. Thackray et als (1977) air traffic controllers and Staves (1977) pilots exerted compensatory effort to sustain efficient performance. Also, the subjects of such studies have frequently shown intense hostility, particularly when the requirement for repetitive or continuous motor activity precluded any voluntary cessa- tion of attention to the task. The complaints of industrial workers have also been interpreted as revealing their continual effort to overcome some attentional deficit, and further, anxiety associated with the occurrence of attentional failures (Ferguson 1973; Laville and Teiger 1975; Nilsson 1975). The hostility felt by workers and students under such circumstances was likewise well documented (Broadbent 1979; Korn- hauser 1965; Robinson 1975).

Before returning to the causes of boredom and its immediate psychological effects, it seems appropriate to consider the consequences of chronic boredom. Acute behavioral effects may be more important with respect to errors and accidents within the task, but over time, effects of chronic boredom extending beyond the task can be more detrimental. It may even be impossible to fully appreciate the meaning of acute effects without considering their long-term consequences.

Repeated occurrence of boredom within a monotonous task can foster pervasive feelings of dissatisfaction with the entire working environment (Caplan et al. 1975; Gjesne 1977); the behavioral effects of boredom leading to dissatisfaction were sufficient to seriously reduce the academic achievements of students (Fogelman 1976; Robinson 1975). The behavioral effects of boredom leading to dissatisfaction


among industrial workers are currently a matter of controversy (see Dubois 1976, [ 19791; OToole 1973). However, in the only study where absenteeism was gauged in relation to the objectively defined repetitiveness of a single task, a relationship emerged: absenteeism among groups of bottle inspectors was directly related to inspection rate, and inversely, to time spent at the monotonous task (Saito et al. 1972).

Chronic boredom was reported by a minority of workers, performing all but except the most repetitive, machine-paced tasks. Whether these individuals were unusually sensitive, or unable to adapt to monotonous stimulation was not revealed by survey results. Nevertheless, their afflic- tion was apparently severe. They were seen as more neurotic, depressed and anxious than others in the same situation. Although physical health impairment has not been related to boredom per st, the striking incidence of psychosomatic disease (e.g. gastritis and peptic ulcers) in occupations where severe boredom is prevalent, reasonably leads one to infer that relationship.

Toward a theory of boredom

A comprehensive theory of boredom should relate the eliciting physical factors to the mediating brain process, then to observable behaviors and whole-body physiological reactions, and finally to their practical consequences. It is doubtful whether the available information would permit anyone to formulate such a theory ,at this time. It might just suffice for constructing an outline of a concept of boredom serving as the first stage in the theorys evolution. The attempt made here to con- ceptualize boredom as a unique psychophysiological state rests mainly upon previous concepts of arousal, habituation, effort and stress. The latter first must be briefly defined and related to observations of bore- doms concomitants.

According to Duffys ( 1962: 17) most general definition, arousal is the conversion of potential energy sources into neuronal impulses that either excite another physiological mechanism, or inhibit it from performing some function already in progress. This definition still applies, although it is now recognized that there exist several major arousal gen- erators that function in partial independence to control the same or different systems (Berlyne 1967; Blum et al. 1967; Routtenberg 1968; Pri-


bram and McGuinness 1975). Rather than restricting the definition to apply for arousal generated by any hypothetical mechanism, arousal shall refer here only to the condition of the cerebral cortex.

Cortical arousal can vary across a continuum from coma, through stages of sleep and wakefulness, to extreme, disorganized excitation. The efficiency of behavior is a non-monotonic function of cortical arousal, rising in the wakeful state to some maximum point and diminishing as arousal increases further (the Yerkes-Dodson law, Duffy 1962; Hockey 1979; Kahneman 1973). The point of optimal arousal for behavioral efficiency depends upon the complexity of information processing to meet task requirements: the optimal point diminishes as a function of the task difficulty. Several authors have argued that the optimal arousal must be homeostatically maintained by arousal generat- ing mechanisms, not only to sustain efficient performance but to save the system from a variety of malfunctions and even structural damage (Hebb 1955; Lindsley 196 1; Schultz 1967; Zuckerman 1969). This implies either a self-monitoring cortical function (Broadbent 1971) or the existence of yet another system having the specific function of monitoring cortical arousal and initiating compensatory activity to restore arousal. The compensatory activity can either be wholly internal, or that, in combination with behavior modifying the sensory input (Fiske and Maddi 1961).

Arousal is to a large part determined by sensory stimulation. When a person first encounters a task, the relatively high degrees of stimulus novelty, complexity and surprisingness, relative to his prior experience and expectations, and conflict with respect to simultaneously elicited response tendencies, are thought to produce arousal at or above the optimal level (Berlyne 1960). Stimuli which possess high values in any or all of these dimensions reliably evoke the phasic rise in arousal known as the orienting reaction and many in succession sustain a high tonic arousal level. However, as exposure to the task continues, stimuli become less novel and surprising and one response tendency becomes predominant, reducing conflict. Habituation, or the decrease in both phasic and tonic arousal in response to repetitive sensory stimulation, is then said to occur (Lynn 1966).

Habituation of cortical arousal is apparently the result of a direct inhibitory action by some cortical or subcortical mechanism that is acti- vated by monotonous sensory stimulation (Groves and Thompson 1970; Horn 1967; Kimble 1968; Sokolov 1963). J.F. Mackworth

J.F. 0 Hanlon /Boredom: practical consequences and a theory 71

( 1969) has proposed that active inhibition of cortical arousal by repetitive stimulation is generally responsible for the observed performance decrements in all types of monotonous work. She cited evidence to show that the same factors affect both habituation during simple exposure to repetitive stimulation and performance during monitoring tasks; e.g. the rate of monotonous stimulation directly affected the rate of habituation and that of the decrement. Mackworths habituation hypothesis would lead one to predict that a rise or fall in the frequency of a monitoring task should, respectively, impair or facilitate signal detection performance. This was in fact observed by Krulewitz et al. (1975). As mentioned already, the stimulus rate also determines some of the behavioral, subjective and physiological concomitants of boredom in repetitive work (Saito et al. 1972; Johansson et al. 1978; Thack- ray et al. 1979).

However, there are several problems with using the habituation hypothesis to explain a low level of behavioral efficiency associated with boredom. Simple habituation occurs much more rapidly and usually follows a more monotonic timecourse than the performance decrement in monotonous tasks (Posrier 1975). Also, humans undergoing simple habituation experiments are said to experience little of the emotional reaction of boredom (Lynn 1966). Instead, they often go to sleep in less than 30 minutes time (e.g. Bohlin 1971, 1973).

Habituation may nonetheless be the psychophysiological beginning of boredom. The trend of diminishing arousal that would ultimately lead to sleep may be attributed to a lowering of the homeostatic set- point for arousal. Optimal arousal now possesses two meanings: that which is task-optimal with respect ,to performance and that which is personal-optimal as determined by the homeostatic set-point. So long as the individual is unaware of this difference and allows habituation to determine his personal-optimal arousal level, he should experience no drive or motivation to raise his arousal. He should experience none of the emotional reaction which is commonly associated with a drive to

restore arousal homeostasis (Stanger 1977). He will, however, perform less efficiently than when personal-optimal and task-optimal arousal levels are the same.

Sooner or later, declining arousal in any monotonous task situation will fall below a level allowing the continuation of adequate performance. This we shall define as the minimaI arousal level. Minimal in this definition does not refer to the individuals physiological condition,


except as it affects his ability to perform the task without interruption or a failure to react appropriately to the sudden occurrence of a critical event. Evidence for the transient form of arousal below the minimal level in monotonous tasks is abundant. The above-mentioned lapses in practical tasks, the mental blocks responsible for extra long reaction times in serial responding tasks (Bills 1931; Sanders and Hoogen- boom 1970), sudden error increase in continuous tracking tasks (Kogi and Saito 1973) and failures to detect signals in monitoring tasks are all attributed to this event (as originally suggested by Haider 1962).

The individuals recognition of performance failure occurs after the fact. As arousal below the minimal level does not necessarily imply a loss of consciousness, he may still be able to perceive his own failure (e.g. that he is off track or that he has not immediately responded to the occurrence of a critical event). In real tasks, of course, the performance failure can be of such consequence as to bring immediate punishing feedback from an outside agent. In any case, the recognition of a performance failure might be expected to immediately restore the arousal set-point to a level approximating the task-optimal level.

The individual whose arousal has successfully recovered from its first descent below the minimal level now faces a difficult choice. He can permit the same to occur again, but may choose not to do so in anticipation of the punishing consequences. He can leave the environment that provides him with inadequately arousing stimulation, &enliven it in some way. However, when he is constrained to remain in place and forbidden to break his monotonous routine then he must choose the only other available alternative. He must exert effort to maintain his arousal setpoint at the task-optimal level, or something between that and the minimal.

The concept of effort was introduced by Kahneman (1973) as the capacity (or attention) available to perform some task. The miscella- neous determinants of arousal in the task were thought to determine the baseline level of effort. Beyond that, voluntary mobilization of effort was possible to a limit that was in part intrinsic, and in part set by external arousal determinants (i.e., more effort is possible in more arousing tasks). Pribram and McGuinness ( 1975) offered an alternative, but. not wholly distinct, definition of effort as part of a 3-process neu- ropsychological model of attention. Effort was described as the coor- dinating process between arousal (stimulus determined) and activation (controlling response readiness). Effort was necessary to uncouple


arousal and activation. When monotonous stimulation depresses the arousal process, their model indicates that attention and the readiness to respond must be sustained by effort. Effort is simply defined here as a voluntary, internally generated process that increases arousal when the available sensory stimulation is insufficient for maintaining it at the task-optimal level.

Effort is commonly reported to be an unpleasant subjective component of boredom. By itself, effort achieves no reward from the environment. Whatever the brain process for effort might be, it seems apart from that mediating the experience of positive affect (e.g. Routten- bergs Arousal System II). One might, therefore, expect the extinction of effort over time in so far as it resembles any type of unrein- forced behavior.

Boredom thus involves the conflict between habituation and effort to maintain a satisfactory level of arousal for performing the task. But if the process responsible for the former is constant whereas that for the latter varies with recurrent voluntary elicitation followed by invol- untary extinction, a fluctuating level of arousal and performance efficiency would result. Lowenstein and Lowenfeld (1952) may have measured this in successive pupillary dilations of humans whose only task was to stay awake while viewing a flashing light. Dilations were initially large but declined and recovered regularly in direct correspon- dence with feelings of fatigue and boredom. The periods of recovery were said to reveal the individuals repeated efforts to stay awake. Indi- viduals who were extremely fatigued prior to the repetitive stimulation, and animals that presumably made none of the human effort, showed no periodic pupillary fluctuations. Instead, the reflex grew weaker and both humans and animals rapidly went to sleep. Human pupillary dilations to similar acoustic events constituting signals and noise in a prolonged monitoring task followed a similar time course and were also related to the efficiency of performance (i.e. detections of signals, Beatty and Wagoner 1975; Beatty and Wilson 1977). These results are particularly interesting because of Kahnemans claim that changes in pupillary dilation reflect momentary effort fluctuations.

Other objective measures of effort are.conceivable. In particular, the activity level in the somatic musculature either inferred from movement frequency (restlessness), from EMG correlates of sustained isometric tension in face and neck muscles, or from finger tremor frequency, increased over time in subjects performing various types of mono-


tonous, though sedentary, work (Movement: Baker 1959; Thackray et al. 1977; EMG: Eason et aZ. 1965; Luccacini 1968; Stern 1966; Weber et al. in press; Wilkinson 1960; Tremor: Groll 1966). In every case this occurred while performance efficiency declined, and in most cases, when other physiological measures indicated a general waning of cortical or autonomic arousal. In referring to Wilkinsons results, Broadbent ( 197 1: 4 12-4 13) speculated that muscle tension might be a singularly revealing measure of effort, in this case to offset the dearousing effects of sleep loss. Fussler-Pfohl et al. (in press) went further to show that elevated EMG activity in the neck accompanied the requirement for sustained attention to make a difficult size discrimination among ball- bearings in a repetitive manual sorting and packaging task. Neck EMG activity was about 30% less when the same subjects merely packaged the ball-bearings without regard to size.

Recently, Hockey ( 1979) asserted that low arousal becomes stressful if an individual is required to counteract this state. Presumably he was referring to something like effort as defined here. Yet effort is not stress. Stress as originally defined (Selye 1976), is the whole-body reaction to preserve homeostasis in the presence of some agent that would disturb it (ie. a stressor). If optimal arousal is homeostatically maintained, and if it must not be allowed to fall to a level that monotonous sensory stimulation can sustain, then that stimulation is the stresspr and effort is a stress-controlling process. If so, some measure of effort would be a useful sign of stress in boredom (Teichner 1968), and perhaps the only sign in a task where effort is successful.

To say that effort is not stress, is to say that boredom, as a state of the brain, is also not stress. But the consequences of boredom, subjective, behavioral and physiological, may well satisfy every definition of stress. Effort seemingly has a negative affective component that alone may cause pervasive attitudes of dissatisfaction and lead to aversion to the entire working environment. Effort may also have peripheral physiological correlates (e.g. elevated muscle tension) that lead eventually to disease (see Fussler-Pfohl et al. in press). Moreover, in the real world, performance failures as a consequence of boredom may have pro- foundly stressful effects. Failures there are sometimes punished. Where performance failures are frequent and invariably result in punishment, one might expect the individual to react with anxiety and/or hostility. Both reactions are accompanied by well known peripheral reactions (e.g. elevated catecholamine production) that may again lead to disease.


The now intensely negative feelings might become associated by contiguity with other perceived aspects of the working environment so that stress reactions extend beyond the temporal and spatial limits of the monotonous task.

The Swedish edgerman (Nerell 1975; Nilsson 1975; Johansson et al. 1978) seems the archetype of an individual who suffers from the stress of boredom. His work was rapidly and automatically paced. He was not allowed to pause or divert his attention from the monotonous task. His errors were immediately apparent and highly consequential. The work required a high degree of sustained attention, yet he said he was unable to satisfy that requirement. His anxiety and adrenaline rose with the pace of work; his hostility and noradrenaline, with the degree of physical constraint imposed. He.was anxious in the anticipation of the work. And, he was liable to develop psychosomatic disease.

Few tasks are as bad as this and most individuals seem able to cope in normally boring situations. Their physical tasks may be more benign in the sense of being shorter, less repetitive and constraining. The op- portunities for performance failures or the consequences of failures may be less. Workers may even learn to perform less demanding tasks in a low state of arousal which can be maintained by minimal effort. Yet it cannot be denied that for still unexplained reasons of greater sensi- tivity, a sizeable minority of individuals in all monotonous occupations complain of boredom and show some of the signs of the edgermans stress. On this basis one can conclude that stress due to chronic boredom is a common problem of enormous proportions.

The present concept of boredom explains why stimulation repetitiveness is a determinant of boredom: that factor directly affects habituation. It also explains why rapid machine-paced work is more stressful than more variable but just as rapid self-paced work: attentional failures are less likely to lead to performance failures and punishment. Finally, it accounts for the ameliatory effect, of short rest pauses as the only way to reduce habituation in an otherwise constant environment.

The concept leads to several rather surprising predictions. Boredom should increase with the perceptual difficulty of the task as performed within constantly repetitious, short working cycles, insofar as this raises the task-optimal arousal lever more than the personal-optimal level, and thereby the effort requirement. It should increase with more stringent performance demands, as this raises the minimal arousal level and denies the individual the possibility of working with much less than

76 IF. 0 HanIon /Boredom: practical consequences and a theory

task-optimal arousal. Stress as a consequence of boredom should increase in direct relationship to the immediacy and intensity of punishment for performance failures. On the individual level, boredom should be greatest in persons (1) whose arousal habituates most rapidly in the presence of monotonous stimulation, (2) whose personal-optimal arousal levels are the lowest, either naturally or as the result of some external factor (e.g. sleep loss), and (3) who actively strive to maintain a task-optimal arousal level, and peak performance efficiency, by the expenditure of effort.

Summary: a concept of boredom

Boredom was defined as a unique psychophysiological state. It com- prises a set of interrelated emotional, motivational and cognitive reactions having a common biological basis. Boredom is a prevalent and sometimes very serious problem in real-life situations. Performance inef- ficiency accompanies boredom as does general dissatisfaction with the setting in which boredom occurs.

The physical factors that cause boredom are complex, but always include exposure to constant or repetitious sensory stimulation. Two underlying physiological factors were identified: the process, initiated by monotonous stimulation, of inhibiting cortical arousal (habituation); and a compensatory process elicited to restore arousal to an optimal level for task performance (effort). Effort is the more dynamic process. It is an unrewarding voluntary activity that tends to extinguish over time. When effort is no longer able to counteract habituation, cortical arousal declines below the point necessary for supporting acceptable performance. The continuous flow of information through the cortex to response systems is interrupted and a performance failure occurs. This plienomenom has previously been called a lapse or mental block. Performance failures can have punishing consequences. Effort is mobilized to forestall the recurrence of the failure. Effort, hostility and sometimes anxiety contribute to an emotional disturbance that, with its peripheral correlates, may constitute the state of stress. Any perceived aspect of the situation can become associated with the emotional disturbance by contiguity. The entire situation may finally come to elicit the emotional reaction and stress, soon after exposure begins or even in its anticipation.

J. F. 0 Hanlon /Boredom: practical consequences and a theory II

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