Danckert James, Elpidorou Andreas
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1, Canada.
Department of Philosophy, University of Louisville, 308 Bingham Humanities Building, Louisville, KY 40292, USA.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2023 May;27(5):494-507. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2023.02.002. Epub 2023 Mar 14.
Boredom has been characterized as a crisis of meaning, a failure of attention, and a call to action. Yet as a self-regulatory signal writ-large, we are still left with the question of what makes any given boredom episode meaningless, disengaging, or a prompt to act. We propose that boredom is an affective signal that we have deviated from an optimal ('Goldilocks') zone of cognitive engagement. Such deviations may be due to a perceived lack of meaning, arise as a consequence of struggles we are experiencing in attending to a task, or be interpreted as a blunt call to find something different to engage with. Thus, the key to understanding boredom lies in its role in keeping us cognitively engaged.
无聊被描述为一种意义危机、注意力的失败以及行动的召唤。然而，作为一种广义的自我调节信号，我们仍然面临着这样一个问题：是什么使得任何特定的无聊时刻变得毫无意义、让人分心或者成为行动的诱因。我们认为，无聊是一种情感信号，表明我们已经偏离了认知参与的最佳（“刚刚好”）区域。这种偏离可能是由于感觉到缺乏意义，是我们在专注于一项任务时所经历的挣扎的结果，或者被理解为一种直接的召唤，促使我们去寻找不同的事情来参与。因此，理解无聊的关键在于它在保持我们认知参与方面所起的作用。
