A desire for desires: Boredom and its relation to alexithymia

Participants completed self-report scales of boredom, emotional awareness and external orientation. Structural equation modeling indicated that boredom, emotional awareness and external orientation are distinctly measurable but correlated – the bored individual is unaware of emotions and externally-oriented. Furthermore, although the bored person typically complains that the external world fails to engage them, the present findings suggest the underlying problem may be in the person’s inability to consciously access and understand their emotions. The present findings and accompanying literature review challenge the simplistic notion that boredom is never more than a trivial annoyance resulting from an under-stimulating environment.