段落A

We all know how it feels – it’s impossible to keep your mind on anything, time stretches out, and all the things you could do seem equally unlikely to make you feel better. But defining boredom so that it can be studied in the lab has proved difficult. For a start, it can include a lot of other mental states, such as frustration, apathy, depression and indifference. There isn’t even agreement over whether boredom is always a low-energy, flat kind of emotion or whether feeling agitated and restless counts as boredom, too. In his book, Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the University of Calgary, Canada, compares it to disgust – an emotion that motivates us to stay away from certain situations. ‘If disgust protects humans from infection, boredom may protect them from “infectious” social situations,’ he suggests.

段落A： 我们都知道这种感觉——无法将注意力集中在任何事情上，时间变得漫长，所有可以做的事情似乎同样不可能让你感觉好受。但是，将无聊定义出来以便在实验室中研究并不容易。首先，它可能包含许多其他心理状态，比如挫败、冷漠、抑郁和漠不关心。甚至对于无聊是否总是一种低能量、平淡的情绪还存在分歧，还有人认为焦躁不安和坐立不安也属于无聊。加拿大卡尔加里大学的彼得·图伊在他的书《无聊：一个生动的历史》中将其比作厌恶 - 一种激励我们远离某些情况的情绪。他认为：“如果厌恶能保护人类免受感染，那么无聊可能会保护他们免受“传染”性社交场合”。

段落B

By asking people about their experiences of boredom, Thomas Goetz and his team at the University of Konstanz in Germany have recently identified five distinct types: indifferent, calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. These can be plotted on two axes – one running left to right, which measures low to high arousal, and the other from top to bottom, which measures how positive or negative the feeling is. Intriguingly, Goetz has found that while people experience all kinds of boredom, they tend to specialise in one. Of the five types, the most damaging is ‘reactant’ boredom with its explosive combination of high arousal and negative emotion. The most useful is what Goetz calls ‘indifferent’ boredom: someone isn’t engaged in anything satisfying but still feels relaxed and calm. However, it remains to be seen whether there are any character traits that predict the kind of boredom each of us might be prone to.

段落B： 德国康斯坦茨大学的托马斯·戈茨和他的团队最近通过询问人们对无聊的经历，确定了五种不同类型：冷漠型、校准型、搜索型、反应型和冷淡型。这些类型可以在两个轴上标出——一个从左到右，表示从低到高的激励，另一个从上到下，表示感觉是积极的还是消极的程度。有趣的是，戈茨发现，人们虽然会经历各种各样的无聊，但他们往往专注于其中一种。在这五种类型中，最具破坏性的是“反应型”无聊，它具有高度激动和消极情绪的爆炸性组合。最有用的是戈茨所说的“冷漠型”无聊：某人没有参与任何令人满足的事情，但仍然感觉放松和平静。然而，目前还不清楚是否有任何个性特征可以预测我们可能容易产生哪种类型的无聊。

段落C

Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, goes further. ‘All emotions are there for a reason, including boredom,’ she says. Mann has found that being bored makes us more creative. ‘We’re all afraid of being bored but in actual fact it can lead to all kinds of amazing things,’ she says. In experiments published last year, Mann found that people who had been made to feel bored by copying numbers out of the phone book for 15 minutes came up with more creative ideas about how to use a polystyrene cup than a control group. This article is from Laokaoya website. Mann concluded that a passive, boring activity is best for creativity because it allows the mind to wander. In fact, she goes so far as to suggest that we should seek out more boredom in our lives.

段落C： 英国中央兰开夏大学的心理学家桑迪·曼认为无聊的作用更深远。她说：“包括无聊在内，所有的情绪都有其存在的原因。”曼发现，无聊使我们更有创造力。她说：“我们都害怕无聊，但实际上它可以引发各种奇妙的事情。”在去年发表的实验中，曼发现，让人们在15分钟内抄写电话簿上的号码，然后让他们提出如何使用保温杯的创意时，他们比对照组提出了更多创意。曼得出结论说，对于创造力来说，一种被动的、乏味的活动是最好的，因为它能让思维飘散。事实上，她甚至提出我们应该在生活中寻求更多的无聊。

段落D

Psychologist John Eastwood at York University in Toronto, Canada, isn’t convinced. ‘If you are in a state of mind-wandering you are not bored,’ he says. ‘In my view, by definition boredom is an undesirable state.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t adaptive, he adds. ‘Pain is adaptive – if we didn’t have physical pain, bad things would happen to us. Does that mean that we should actively cause pain? No. But even if boredom has evolved to help us survive, it can still be toxic if allowed to fester.’ For Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is a failure to put our ‘attention system’ into gear. This causes an inability to focus on anything, which makes time seem to go painfully slowly. What’s more, your efforts to improve the situation can end up making you feel worse. ‘People try to connect with the world and if they are not successful there’s that frustration and irritability,’ he says. Perhaps most worryingly, says Eastwood, repeatedly failing to engage attention can lead to a state where we don’t know what to do anymore, and no longer care.

段落D： 加拿大多伦多约克大学的心理学家约翰·伊斯特伍德并不认同这种观点。他说：“如果你的思维飘散，你就不会感到无聊。”他补充说：“在我看来，根据定义，无聊是一种不理想的状态。他补充道，这并不意味着无聊不具备适应性。他说：“疼痛是有适应性的，如果我们没有身体的疼痛，我们会遭受不好的后果。这是否意味着我们应该主动引起疼痛？不。但是，即使无聊已经进化为帮助我们生存的一种状态，如果不加以处理，它仍然可能产生有害影响。”对于伊斯特伍德来说，无聊的核心特征是我们的“注意系统”无法启动。这导致我们无法专注于任何事物，时间似乎变得非常缓慢。而且，你试图改善情况的努力可能会让你感到更糟。“人们试图与世界联系，如果他们没有成功，就会感到沮丧和烦躁，”他说。伊斯特伍德还表示，最令人担忧的是，反复无法引起注意力的结果可能是我们不再知道该怎么办，也不再关心。

段落E

Eastwood’s team is now trying to explore why the attention system fails. It’s early days but they think that at least some of it comes down to personality. Boredom proneness has been linked with a variety of traits. People who are motivated by pleasure seem to suffer particularly badly. Other personality traits, such as curiosity, are associated with a high boredom threshold. More evidence that boredom has detrimental effects comes from studies of people who are more or less prone to boredom. It seems those who bore easily face poorer prospects in education, their career and even life in general. But of course, boredom itself cannot kill – it’s the things we do to deal with it that may put us in danger. What can we do to alleviate it before it comes to that? Goetz’s group has one suggestion. Working with teenagers, they found that those who ‘approach’ a boring situation-in other words, see that it’s boring and get stuck in any way -report less boredom than those who try to avoid it by using snacks, TV or social media for distraction.

段落E： 伊斯特伍德的团队现在正试图探究为什么注意力系统会失败。尽管还处于初级阶段，但他们认为这至少部分归因于个性。无聊易感性与各种特质有关，那些受快乐驱使的人似乎会受到更大的影响，而好奇心等其他个性特质与无聊门槛较高相关。更多关于无聊对人的不利影响的证据来自于对更容易或更难感到无聊的人的研究。似乎那些容易感到无聊的人在教育、职业和生活前景方面都面临着较差的结果。但当然，无聊本身不能致命 - 我们为处理它所做的事情可能会把我们置于危险之中。在那之前，我们该怎么缓解无聊呢？戈茨的团队提出了一个建议。他们在与青少年合作的研究中发现，那些“面对”一个无聊的环境，也就是说，意识到它无聊并努力参与其中的人，报告的无聊感较少，而那些试图通过吃零食、看电视或使用社交媒体来转移注意力的人则报告的无聊感更多。

段落F

Psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder speculates that our over-connected lifestyles might even be a new source of boredom. ‘In modern human society there is a lot of overstimulation but still a lot of problems finding meaning,’ she says. So instead of seeking yet more mental stimulation, perhaps we should leave our phones alone, and use boredom to motivate us to engage with the world in a more meaningful way.