HPA activity mediates the link between trait impulsivity and boredom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Boredom is a complex emotional state implicated in several psychopathologies. • Impulsivity, the tendency to act without thinking, is also linked to psychopathology. • Those high in trait impulsivity find boring tasks more boring. • Impulsive individuals find boring tasks stressful as indexed by increased salivary cortisol. Boredom, a complex emotional state with implications for mental health and well-being, has garnered attention across disciplines, yet remains relatively understudied in psychiatric research. Here, we explored the intricate relationship between trait-impulsivity, stress, and boredom across two studies. Participants completed self-report measures of trait-impulsivity and boredom and boredom-inducing tasks. Study 1, involving 80 participants (42 women and 38 men, aged 20–63), replicates previous findings, by demonstrating that impulsive individuals report greater boredom following a boring task. Study 2 then extends this, using 20 participants (9 women and 12 men, aged 18–24), to show that hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity, specifically heightened salivary cortisol responses, mediate the link between impulsivity and boredom following a boring task. Collectively, these results demonstrate that HPA axis activity may underline the relationship between trait-impulsivity and boredom by extending previous work and offering a novel insight into potential mechanisms. These findings offer promise for personalised interventions, designed for high impulsivity individuals, to alleviate the negative impacts of boredom and potentially break the identified feedback loop.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".