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      Bored Into Depletion? Toward a Tentative Integration of Perceived Self-Control Exertion and Boredom as Guiding Signals for Goal-Directed Behavior

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          Abstract

          During the past two decades, self-control research has been dominated by the strength model of self-control, which is built on the premise that the capacity for self-control is a limited global resource that can become temporarily depleted, resulting in a state called ego depletion. The foundations of ego depletion have recently been questioned. Thus, although self-control is among the most researched psychological concepts with high societal relevance, an inconsistent body of literature limits our understanding of how self-control operates. Here, we propose that the inconsistencies are partly due to a confound that has unknowingly and systematically been introduced into the ego-depletion research: boredom. We propose that boredom might affect results of self-control research by placing an unwanted demand on self-control and signaling that one should explore behavioral alternatives. To account for boredom in self-controlled behavior, we provide a working model that integrates evidence from reward-based models of self-control and recent theorizing on boredom to explain the effects of both self-control exertion and boredom on subsequent self-control performance. We propose that task-induced boredom should be systematically monitored in self-control research to assess the validity of the ego-depletion effect.

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          Most cited references59

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          Taking stock of self-control: a meta-analysis of how trait self-control relates to a wide range of behaviors.

          Given assertions of the theoretical, empirical, and practical importance of self-control, this meta-analytic study sought to review evidence concerning the relationship between dispositional self-control and behavior. The authors provide a brief overview over prominent theories of self-control, identifying implicit assumptions surrounding the effects of self-control that warrant empirical testing. They report the results of a meta-analysis of 102 studies (total N = 32,648) investigating the behavioral effects of self-control using the Self-Control Scale, the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, and the Low Self-Control Scale. A small to medium positive effect of self-control on behavior was found for the three scales. Only the Self-Control Scale allowed for a fine-grained analysis of conceptual moderators of the self-control behavior relation. Specifically, self-control (measured by the Self-Control Scale) related similarly to the performance of desired behaviors and the inhibition of undesired behaviors, but its effects varied dramatically across life domains (e.g., achievement, adjustment). In addition, the associations between self-control and behavior were significantly stronger for automatic (as compared to controlled) behavior and for imagined (as compared to actual) behavior.
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            Novelty, complexity, and hedonic value

            D Berlyne (1970)
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              The Unengaged Mind: Defining Boredom in Terms of Attention.

              Our central goal is to provide a definition of boredom in terms of the underlying mental processes that occur during an instance of boredom. Through the synthesis of psychodynamic, existential, arousal, and cognitive theories of boredom, we argue that boredom is universally conceptualized as "the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity." We propose to map this conceptualization onto underlying mental processes. Specifically, we propose that boredom be defined in terms of attention. That is, boredom is the aversive state that occurs when we (a) are not able to successfully engage attention with internal (e.g., thoughts or feelings) or external (e.g., environmental stimuli) information required for participating in satisfying activity, (b) are focused on the fact that we are not able to engage attention and participate in satisfying activity, and (c) attribute the cause of our aversive state to the environment. We believe that our definition of boredom fully accounts for the phenomenal experience of boredom, brings existing theories of boredom into dialogue with one another, and suggests specific directions for future research on boredom and attention.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Perspect Psychol Sci
                Perspect Psychol Sci
                PPS
                sppps
                Perspectives on Psychological Science
                SAGE Publications (Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA )
                1745-6916
                1745-6924
                22 July 2020
                September 2020
                : 15
                : 5
                : 1272-1283
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Sport Science, University of Konstanz
                [2 ]Department of Educational Psychology, University of Bern
                [3 ]Faculty of Psychology, Swiss Distance University Institute
                Author notes
                [*]Wanja Wolff, University of Konstanz, Universitätsstrasse 10, 78464 Konstanz, Germany E-mail: wanja.wolff@ 123456uni-konstanz.de
                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8130-0272
                Article
                10.1177_1745691620921394
                10.1177/1745691620921394
                7477773
                32697921
                65baf214-20ad-44d9-bb97-3444d94fb6d0
                © The Author(s) 2020

                This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page ( https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

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                self-control,ego depletion,boredom,value-based models,psychoneurophysiological approach

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