The research team, led by Reyhaneh Sardarzehi and colleagues at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, set out to address a longstanding gap in the psychological literature. Although the feeling of emptiness is clinically significant, particularly in conditions such as borderline personality disorder, depression, and trauma-related disorders, it remains poorly defined and has often been treated as a symptom that overlaps with other constructs. The central question was whether emptiness is reducible to a combination of related states, or whether it exists as a distinct and influential entity within the broader landscape of negative emotion.

To answer this question, the researchers turned to network analysis, a statistical framework that treats psychological constructs as interconnected nodes rather than isolated variables. Participants completed validated self-report measures of emptiness, loneliness, dysphoria, boredom, hopelessness, and dissociation. The team then estimated a regularized partial correlation network using the EBICglasso method, a technique that identifies the unique associations between constructs while controlling for the influence of all other nodes in the network. This approach allows researchers to distinguish direct connections from indirect ones, revealing which emotional states are truly intertwined and which merely co-occur.

The results were striking. The feeling of emptiness emerged as the most influential node in the network, achieving the highest strength centrality score of 1.18. Strength centrality measures how strongly a node is connected to its neighbors, and in this case, emptiness demonstrated robust direct connections to dysphoria with an edge weight of 0.37, loneliness with 0.38, and boredom with 0.29. These edge weights represent the strength of the partial correlations between constructs after accounting for all other relationships in the network, indicating that emptiness maintains substantial unique associations with each of these three states.

Beyond its connections, emptiness also showed the highest predictability value in the network, with 69 percent of its variance explained by its neighboring nodes. This means that the emotional states surrounding emptiness, particularly loneliness, dysphoria, and boredom, account for a substantial proportion of the variation in how strongly people experience feelings of emptiness. In practical terms, the findings suggest that emptiness is not an isolated phenomenon but is deeply embedded in a cluster of related negative affective experiences.

To ensure that these results were not statistical artifacts, the researchers employed bootstrapped difference tests based on 95 percent bootstrap confidence intervals for pairwise differences in strength centrality. The analysis confirmed that the centrality of emptiness was significantly greater than that of all other nodes in the network, as the confidence intervals for all pairwise strength differences involving emptiness excluded zero. This rigorous statistical validation strengthens the claim that emptiness occupies a genuinely central position rather than appearing central by chance.

Not all relationships in the network were equally strong. The study found that emptiness had only a weak association with hopelessness and no unique direct association with dissociation once other connections were accounted for. This pattern suggests that while hopelessness and dissociation are related to the broader affective network, they are less central to the specific experience of emptiness. The distinction is important because it challenges assumptions that emptiness is simply another expression of hopelessness or a dissociative symptom, and instead points to a more specific emotional profile.

The findings provide empirical support for contemporary theoretical models that have proposed emptiness as a core construct in its own right. Theoretical accounts from psychodynamic, existential, and cognitive traditions have long described emptiness as a fundamental human experience linked to identity disturbance, meaninglessness, and disrupted interpersonal connection. By demonstrating that emptiness sits at the hub of a network of negative affect, the study offers quantitative evidence that this subjective experience may function as a central organizing feature of emotional distress rather than a secondary consequence of other symptoms.

The clinical implications are considerable. If emptiness is indeed a central node, then interventions targeting emptiness directly, rather than only addressing loneliness, dysphoria, or boredom in isolation, may be particularly effective. Therapeutic approaches that help individuals develop a coherent sense of self, establish meaningful connections, and cultivate emotional awareness may act on the hub of the network and produce cascading benefits across related emotional states. Conversely, treatments that focus narrowly on peripheral symptoms may leave the central experience of emptiness intact, potentially explaining why some interventions produce only partial relief.

The authors acknowledge that the study relied on a community sample and self-report measures, which means the findings may not generalize to clinical populations with severe psychopathology. Future research could examine whether emptiness maintains its central position in networks derived from individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, major depression, or complex trauma, and whether longitudinal designs can establish the direction of influence between emptiness and its connected states. Nonetheless, the study represents a significant step toward mapping the internal structure of negative affect and elevating the feeling of emptiness from a poorly defined complaint to a measurable, central construct in psychological science.

Subject of Research: Network analysis of the feeling of emptiness as a central node in an affective network of loneliness, dysphoria, boredom, hopelessness, and dissociation

Article Title: Mapping the void: feeling of emptiness as a central node in an affective network

Article References: Sardarzehi, R., Khazaei, A., Karimi Ahmadabadi, Z., Ahmadi, Z., & Mohajerin, B. (2026). Mapping the void: feeling of emptiness as a central node in an affective network. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05781-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05781-y

Keywords: feeling of emptiness, network analysis, loneliness, dysphoria, boredom, hopelessness, dissociation, negative affect, centrality, psychology, BMC Psychology, mental health

The study stands out because most previous research on the emotional drivers of smartphone use has focused on problematic or addictive patterns of use, rather than the everyday, non-clinical scrolling, streaming, and messaging that fills most people’s days. That gap matters. Understanding how mundane emotional states shape routine digital behavior could reveal why screen time creeps upward for ordinary users and how interventions might be designed not just for people with diagnosable problems, but for everyone trying to maintain healthier habits with their devices.

Technically, the design was demanding. For fourteen consecutive days, the students reported their momentary levels of boredom and perceived stress, along with the motivations behind their phone use. Crucially, the researchers did not rely on self-reported estimates of usage, which are notoriously unreliable. Instead, they measured actual smartphone screen time objectively, including the total time spent on the device and the time devoted to specific categories of activity: short-video viewing, online gaming, interaction with close friends and family, and online learning. This combination of repeated in-the-moment emotional reports and objective usage data allowed the team to separate short-term, day-to-day fluctuations within each person from stable differences between people.

Analyzing the data required multilevel structural equation modeling, a statistical framework built for intensive longitudinal data of this kind. The approach lets researchers model two distinct levels of association simultaneously: the within-person level, which asks whether moments or days when a student felt more bored or more stressed than usual were followed by changes in that same student’s phone use, and the between-person level, which asks whether students who are generally more bored or more stressed tend to use their phones more overall. Conflating these two levels is one of the most common errors in psychological research, and the Yangzhou team’s design was explicitly built to avoid it.

The headline result was stark: boredom, but not perceived stress, directly predicted total daily smartphone screen time. On days when students felt more bored than their own typical level, they spent measurably more time on their phones, particularly on short-video platforms and online games. This fits with a growing body of work suggesting that boredom is not simply a low-arousal, passive state. Recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses indicate that boredom carries a distinctive psychophysiological signature, and laboratory research has characterized it as an aversive state that motivates people to seek whatever stimulation is immediately available. Short videos, with their rapid pacing and endless novelty, are almost purpose-built to satisfy that craving.

Yet boredom’s effects were not uniformly amplifying. The study found that boredom also indirectly reduced the time students spent on two seemingly beneficial activities: strong-tie social interaction and online learning. The mechanism was suppression of information-seeking motivation. In other words, when boredom rose, students became less inclined to seek out information, and that drop in motivation translated into less time messaging close contacts and less time engaged in online coursework. This is a subtle but consequential finding. It suggests that boredom does not merely add passive entertainment to a person’s digital diet; it actively crowds out more effortful, engagement-oriented uses of the same device.

Perceived stress told a strikingly different story. Although stress did not directly increase overall screen time, it exerted indirect effects that were essentially the mirror image of boredom’s. On days when students felt more stressed, their time on strong-tie social interaction and online learning increased, patterns consistent with classic theories of affiliation under pressure. The well-known tend-and-befriend framework proposes that humans often respond to stress by seeking connection with close others, and the new findings suggest that smartphones have become a primary venue for that coping strategy. Stress also shifted students’ motivations in ways that boosted learning-related use, echoing prior evidence that perceived stress can function as a motivational force for self-directed online learning among Chinese college students.

The between-person level results added another layer of nuance. When the researchers looked at stable differences across individuals, almost none of the emotional effects on specific categories of use survived. The single exception was strong-tie social interaction, which showed an indirect association with both boredom and stress at the trait-like level. This pattern implies that the day-to-day dynamics of boredom and stress matter far more for understanding everyday screen behavior than does a person’s average emotional disposition. A snapshot questionnaire about typical boredom or stress would miss most of the action; only intensive longitudinal tracking could reveal it.

These results carry practical weight for anyone designing interventions to promote healthier digital habits. Interventions targeting screen time are often built on the assumption that negative emotions uniformly drive excessive use, but the study suggests that the emotional driver and the appropriate response differ by activity. A student doom-scrolling short videos out of boredom might benefit from help finding genuinely stimulating alternatives, whereas a stressed student using the phone to connect with friends or catch up on coursework may be engaging in adaptive coping that should not be discouraged. Blanket screen-time limits, the findings imply, risk treating beneficial uses and mindless ones as equivalent problems.

The research also raises questions that future work will need to address. The sample was modest in size and drawn entirely from a single Chinese university, and the fourteen-day window, while far more informative than a one-time survey, cannot capture longer developmental trends. Because the data are correlational in nature, they cannot definitively establish that boredom causes the observed shifts in usage, although the temporal structure of momentary assessment makes that interpretation the most plausible one. Still, by pairing objective screen-time measurement with a rigorous multilevel analysis of motivational mechanisms, the study offers one of the clearest portraits yet of how two of the most common negative emotional states sculpt our digital lives in different directions, one feeding the feed, the other reaching for a friend.

Subject of Research: The motivational mechanisms linking daily boredom and perceived stress to objectively measured smartphone use behaviors in college students

Article Title: How boredom and perceived stress influence daily smartphone use: The role of usage motivations

Article References: An, X., Xu, H., Rui, X., Bo, Y., Li, W., & Chen, S. (2026). How boredom and perceived stress influence daily smartphone use: The role of usage motivations. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1465. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10021-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10021-y

Keywords: boredom, perceived stress, smartphone use, screen time, ecological momentary assessment, usage motivations, short-video viewing, online gaming, social interaction, online learning, multilevel modeling, college students

The research, led by Mimi Liu and Zifu Shi of Hunan Normal University together with colleagues at Huanghuai University, the Neusoft Institute of Guangdong, and Hunan University of Chinese Medicine, tracked 1,243 Chinese college students across two measurement waves separated by six months. Participants, who averaged 18.54 years of age and were 71.3 percent female, were drawn from six universities. Rather than treating mind wandering as a single undifferentiated tendency, the team measured two distinct flavors of it: spontaneous mind wandering, in which thoughts drift off involuntarily, and deliberate mind wandering, in which a person purposefully redirects attention toward off-task thoughts.

That distinction matters. Spontaneous mind wandering is often framed as a failure of attentional control, an unbidden escape of cognition from the task at hand. Deliberate mind wandering, by contrast, looks more like an intentional choice, a mental vacation the thinker chooses to take. Prior work had mostly examined short-term dynamics between boredom and these tendencies, using designs that could not establish which construct predicted the other over meaningful stretches of time. By adopting a two-wave cross-lagged design, the researchers could ask a sharper question: does being prone to boredom today make you more likely to drift tomorrow, and vice versa, six months down the line?

The answer, for spontaneous mind wandering, is a resounding yes in both directions. After controlling for covariates, students who reported higher boredom proneness at the first wave showed significantly higher spontaneous mind wandering at the second wave, and students whose minds wandered spontaneously at the first wave were significantly more boredom prone six months later. This bidirectional, reciprocal pattern is the statistical signature of a self-reinforcing feedback loop. It dovetails with theoretical models such as the boredom feedback model and the MAC model of boredom and cognitive engagement, which portray boredom as a state in which attention is neither fully engaged nor meaningfully deployed, leaving cognition untethered to wander off in search of stimulation.

Deliberate mind wandering told a more asymmetric story. Boredom proneness at the first wave still predicted more deliberate mind wandering at the second wave, suggesting that people who chronically experience boredom come to treat off-task thinking as a deliberate coping strategy, an exploratory response to an unsatisfying present. But the reverse path was not significant: students who deliberately daydreamed at the first wave did not become more boredom prone by the second. In other words, boredom appears to push people toward intentional mental escape, but choosing to escape does not, by itself, breed boredom. The door swings one way only.

The most novel contribution of the study lies in its treatment of trait mindfulness, the stable dispositional tendency to attend to present-moment experience with awareness. Using cross-lagged mediation analyses, the researchers found that boredom proneness at the first wave was indirectly associated with both spontaneous and deliberate mind wandering at the second wave through trait mindfulness measured at the second wave. The same held in the other direction: higher spontaneous and deliberate mind wandering at baseline were indirectly linked to later boredom proneness through reduced mindfulness. Mindfulness, in effect, acted as a conduit carrying the influence of each construct forward in time.

This mediating role makes theoretical sense. Mindfulness is conceptualized as an attentional and awareness skill, and individuals high in trait mindfulness are better at noticing when attention has drifted and at sustaining contact with the present. A bored person who lacks this skill may have few resources to re-engage with the moment, letting attention slip into spontaneous drift or strategic daydreaming. Conversely, a habitual mind wanderer who never cultivates present-moment awareness may find ordinary experience increasingly dull, deepening boredom proneness. Prior research has linked mindfulness to lower boredom in workplace settings, to reduced media multitasking-related wandering, and to improved metacognition, but this study is among the first to position mindfulness longitudinally between the two constructs over a six-month horizon.

The findings carry practical weight, particularly for educational settings. Boredom proneness among Chinese college students has been rising across birth cohorts according to earlier meta-analytic work, and boredom is reliably associated with poorer academic outcomes, lower satisfaction, and even counterproductive behaviors. If boredom and mind wandering form a reciprocal loop that erodes mindfulness over time, interventions that bolster trait mindfulness, such as mindfulness meditation training, could plausibly interrupt the cycle from either end. The authors’ results are consistent with existing reviews suggesting that mindfulness practice reduces mind wandering, though a longitudinal observational design cannot itself establish that training would work here.

Caveats are worth keeping in view. The sample consisted of young adults at six Chinese universities, and the study relied on self-report scales, including short boredom proneness and Chinese-validated deliberate and spontaneous mind wandering measures, which leaves open the possibility of shared method bias that the authors took steps to address. Two-wave designs also cannot fully disentangle within-person change from stable between-person differences, a limitation that methodologists have raised about cross-lagged panel models generally. Six months is long enough to demonstrate durable associations but still too coarse to reveal the moment-to-moment dynamics by which boredom sparks drift and drift curdles into boredom.

Even so, the study adds an important longitudinal plank to a growing body of work portraying boredom not as a trivial annoyance but as a meaningful state of attentional disengagement with downstream cognitive costs. The picture that emerges is of a feedback system: a boredom-prone mind drifts, a drifting mind grows bored, and diminishing mindfulness lubricates both transitions. The hopeful corollary is that the system has an identified lever. If present-moment awareness can be cultivated, the loop that ties boredom to the wandering mind may be a cycle that can, with practice, be broken.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal associations between boredom proneness, spontaneous and deliberate mind wandering, and trait mindfulness in college students

Article Title: The longitudinal associations between boredom proneness and mind wandering: the role of trait mindfulness

Article References: Liu, M., Chen, H., Xie, J., Xie, J., Ma, X., & Shi, Z. (2026). The longitudinal associations between boredom proneness and mind wandering: the role of trait mindfulness. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1471. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10032-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10032-9

Keywords: boredom proneness, mind wandering, spontaneous mind wandering, deliberate mind wandering, trait mindfulness, longitudinal study, cross-lagged panel model, attention, college students, Current Psychology, meditation, cognitive engagement

The study is grounded in Control-Value Theory, a influential framework developed by psychologist Reinhard Pekrun that explains how achievement emotions arise from two fundamental appraisals. The first is control, a student’s perception of how well they can master a task, which depends on their confidence and their expectations of success or failure. The second is value, the subjective importance a student attaches to the activity and its outcomes. When perceived control is low and the activity is seen as important, students tend to experience anxiety and confusion. When control is high but the activity seems pointless, boredom tends to take over. The theory predicts that these appraisals are themselves shaped by individual characteristics, the home environment, and the classroom and school context, which is precisely the chain the researchers set out to test on an international scale.

The team focused on fifth-grade students, drawing on nationally representative samples from the three countries. Rather than treating emotions as continuous scores, the researchers used binary logistic regression models, a statistical approach that estimates the odds of a student falling into a high-negative-emotion group versus a lower one. Crucially, the analysis incorporated TIMSS sampling weights and jackknife repeated replication procedures, standard techniques in international large-scale assessment research that account for the complex sampling designs of these surveys and produce more accurate standard errors. The predictor variables included instructional clarity, meaning how clearly teachers explain lessons; digital self-efficacy, or students’ confidence in using technology for learning; sense of school belonging; home resources for learning, such as books and educational materials; and school emphasis on academic success. The researchers also tested exploratory interaction terms informed by the Control-Value framework, allowing them to examine whether the effect of one factor depended on the level of another.

The results reveal a striking pattern of both universality and cultural specificity. Some predictors operated similarly across all three countries, suggesting that certain psychological mechanisms transcend national boundaries. Others varied considerably depending on the educational context, underscoring that the emotional experience of learning mathematics is not produced by classroom factors alone but by the interplay between those factors and the surrounding sociocultural and systemic environment. This dual finding is perhaps the study’s most important contribution: it validates the core predictions of Control-Value Theory while cautioning against one-size-fits-all interpretations of how students’ emotions develop.

One of the most consistent findings concerned digital self-efficacy. Across the countries examined, students who felt confident in their ability to use digital tools for learning were frequently associated with lower levels of negative emotions in mathematics. This connection makes sense within the Control-Value framework: confidence in one’s capabilities, whether in handling technology or tackling mathematical content, feeds directly into the sense of control that the theory identifies as a cornerstone of positive emotional experience. In an era when digital learning tools have become embedded in mathematics instruction worldwide, the finding suggests that a student’s relationship with technology may quietly shape their emotional relationship with the subject itself.

Instructional clarity emerged as another powerful predictor, though with notable geographic variation. The association between clear teaching and reduced confusion was particularly strong in South Africa and Türkiye. Confusion, in the language of achievement emotions research, is not merely a momentary state of puzzlement; when persistent and unresolved, it can undermine engagement and push students toward avoidance. The finding implies that when teachers explain mathematical concepts in ways students can follow, they are doing more than transmitting content. They are actively managing the emotional climate of the classroom, reducing the uncertainty that breeds confusion and, by extension, the disengagement that often follows it.

The interaction effects uncovered in the study add a further layer of sophistication. Several significant interactions indicated that the relationship between contextual factors and students’ emotions was not fixed but contingent on other conditions. In practical terms, this means that a factor such as home resources for learning might matter more in one country or for one group of students than in another, or that the protective effect of school belonging could be amplified or diminished by other aspects of the environment. Such findings align with the Control-Value Theory’s insistence that emotions emerge from a dynamic system of appraisals embedded in social settings, rather than from any single variable acting in isolation.

For educators and policymakers, the implications are concrete. The authors point to the value of designing instructional environments that support students’ perceived control over mathematics learning, since environments associated with stronger feelings of control are also associated with lower levels of negative achievement emotions. That could mean clearer explanations, structured opportunities for students to experience competence, and attention to how confidently students can navigate the digital tools increasingly used in lessons. It could also mean recognizing that interventions must be tailored to context: a strategy that reduces boredom in Oslo may not translate directly to Johannesburg or Istanbul without adaptation to local conditions, resources, and cultural expectations around schooling.

The study also carries a broader message about how the education community measures success. International assessments such as TIMSS have traditionally emphasized achievement scores, but this research demonstrates that the emotional experiences accompanying those scores are themselves patterned, predictable, and consequential. Boredom and confusion are not background noise; they are signals of how students appraise their control over learning and the value they attach to it, and they influence engagement, persistence, and ultimately academic outcomes. By modeling these emotions with rigorous statistical methods across three countries, the researchers have helped move achievement emotions from the periphery of educational research toward its center.

The work, conducted by Umut Birkan Özkan, Yeşim Ozansak Topcu, and Buket Karadağ, was published as an open-access article in BMC Psychology on 25 September 2026, allowing researchers, teachers, and policymakers anywhere to examine the full analysis. As mathematics education systems worldwide grapple with persistent gaps in performance and engagement, the study offers a reminder that the path to better outcomes may run through the emotional lives of students as much as through curricula and tests. Understanding why a child feels bored or confused in a mathematics lesson, and which levers in the classroom, the home, and the school can shift those feelings, may prove to be one of the most practical questions education research can ask.

Subject of Research: Cross-national predictors of negative achievement emotions in mathematics among fifth-grade students based on Control-Value Theory

Article Title: Predictors of students’ negative achievement emotions in mathematics: a cross-national analysis based on Control-Value Theory

Article References: Özkan, U. B., Ozansak Topcu, Y., & Karadağ, B. (2026). Predictors of students’ negative achievement emotions in mathematics: a cross-national analysis based on Control-Value Theory. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05669-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05669-x

Keywords: Control-Value Theory, achievement emotions, mathematics education, TIMSS 2023, boredom, confusion, digital self-efficacy, instructional clarity, school belonging, cross-national comparison, logistic regression, educational psychology

The research, led by Xia Zheng of Nanchang University together with colleagues from institutions across China and Spain, focused on the Chinese Achievement Emotions Questionnaire-Mathematics, abbreviated CAEQ-M. Unlike many psychological instruments that are translated directly from English originals, this questionnaire was built from the ground up using open-ended descriptions of classroom emotions written by Taiwanese students. That approach allowed the instrument to capture four emotions the researchers identified as culturally salient in Chinese mathematics classrooms: enjoyment, anger, anxiety, and boredom. The questionnaire draws on the broader framework of the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire, which itself rests on the Control-Value Theory of achievement emotions, the influential account developed by Reinhard Pekrun that links students’ emotional experiences to their sense of control over outcomes and the value they place on academic activities.

What made the new study distinctive was its combination of two features that are rarely tested together: a longitudinal design spanning an entire school year and a modern statistical approach known as exploratory structural equation modeling, or ESEM. The researchers recruited 377 third- and fourth-grade students from two elementary schools in Mainland China and surveyed them at four separate waves across one academic year. Because achievement emotions are thought to fluctuate with classroom experiences, the team wanted to know not just whether the questionnaire worked at a single moment, but whether it measured the same constructs in the same way across repeated occasions, a property psychometricians call longitudinal measurement invariance.

The statistical heart of the study lay in a head-to-head comparison between confirmatory factor analysis, the traditional workhorse of questionnaire validation, and exploratory structural equation modeling with target rotation, known as ESEM-T. The difference between the two approaches may sound technical, but it has profound consequences. Confirmatory factor analysis forces each survey item to load on only one emotion factor, treating any relationship between an item and other emotions as statistical noise to be discarded. ESEM-T, by contrast, permits small cross-loadings, acknowledging that a single statement about math class might tap more than one emotion at once. Human emotions are messy, the argument goes, and measurement models should reflect that messiness rather than deny it.

The results were unambiguous. At every one of the four waves and on every fit index examined, the ESEM-T model fit the data better than the oblique four-factor confirmatory model. More striking still was what happened when cross-loadings were forced to zero. Under the confirmatory model, the latent correlation between anger and boredom ballooned to between 0.88 and 0.95 across the waves, figures so high that the two emotions would appear nearly indistinguishable, almost redundant. Under ESEM-T, the same correlation dropped to a more interpretable range of 0.73 to 0.80. In other words, the apparent overlap between anger and boredom was largely an artifact of the restrictive modeling strategy, not a genuine feature of children’s emotional lives. For anyone who has ever used confirmatory factor analysis to validate an emotions questionnaire, the implication is sobering: the standard method may systematically exaggerate the similarity of negative emotions.

Even with the more flexible model, however, anger and boredom remained the least well differentiated pair of emotions throughout the study, and the anger scale proved to be the weakest of the four subscales. The authors conclude that the measurement of anger in this instrument would benefit from revision, a candid admission that is relatively rare in validation studies, which more often emphasize what works rather than what does not. For researchers planning to use the CAEQ-M, the practical message is clear: the enjoyment, anxiety, and boredom scales can be used with confidence, while anger scores should be interpreted with caution until the scale is refined.

The invariance testing provided the study’s second major contribution. Across the four waves, the researchers found that the four-factor model held with invariant thresholds, loadings, and intercepts, meaning that children interpreted the questionnaire items in the same way in autumn as they did at the end of the school year. The same invariance held across gender at each wave, indicating that boys and girls responded to the instrument equivalently. This is a critical foundation for any longitudinal claim, because without invariance, apparent changes in scores over time could simply reflect changes in how the instrument functions rather than genuine changes in children’s emotions. With invariance established, the researchers could legitimately ask whether emotional experiences shifted across the year.

They had, and the answer was both simple and troubling. Repeated measures analysis of variance revealed that only one of the four emotions changed significantly across the four occasions: boredom. And it did not change in a promising direction. Boredom rose steadily across the school year, with a particularly pronounced elevation at the fourth and final measurement point. Enjoyment, anxiety, and anger, by contrast, remained statistically stable. The finding resonates with a growing international literature suggesting that boredom is among the most corrosive of achievement emotions, associated with reduced attention, shallower learning strategies, lower motivation, and poorer grades. If boredom accumulates as the academic year progresses, classrooms may be quietly losing children’s engagement long before final examinations arrive.

Why might boredom climb? The study itself does not test explanations, but the pattern invites several hypotheses consistent with Control-Value Theory. Boredom arises when students perceive an activity as lacking value or when their sense of control is undermined by tasks that are either too repetitive or mismatched to their skill level. A mathematics curriculum that becomes more demanding or more monotonous in the later months of the school year could plausibly push more children into this emotional state. Alternatively, the cumulative fatigue of a long academic year, with its cycle of drills, homework, and assessments, may erode the novelty and perceived meaningfulness of math lessons. Distinguishing among these possibilities will require future studies that pair emotion measurements with detailed records of classroom activities and instructional practices.

The study’s strengths lie in its design: four measurement occasions, a sample of young children who are often overlooked in emotion research, a culturally grounded instrument, and a modeling approach that many psychometricians argue should become the default for multi-item emotion scales. Its limitations are those of any single-region study; the participants came from two elementary schools in Mainland China, and generalization to other regions, age groups, and subjects remains to be demonstrated. Still, the implications reach well beyond psychometrics. For educators, the steady rise of boredom across the year is a signal worth heeding, a reminder that emotional engagement is not a fixed trait but a resource that can be depleted. For researchers, the work is a methodological wake-up call, demonstrating that the choice between confirmatory and exploratory modeling is not a technical footnote but a decision that can reshape what we believe about the emotional lives of students. As mathematics classrooms around the world grapple with declining engagement, knowing how to measure the emotions involved, accurately and over time, is an essential first step toward addressing them.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal psychometric validation of a mathematics achievement emotions questionnaire in Chinese elementary school children

Article Title: Longitudinal validation of the Chinese Achievement Emotions Questionnaire-Mathematics: A one-year study using exploratory structural equation modeling

Article References: Zheng, X., Chen, J., Fu, Q.-L., Wang, H., Zhou, Y., Liao, X.-L., Chen, N., Chen, I.-H., & Malas, O. (2026). Longitudinal validation of the Chinese Achievement Emotions Questionnaire-Mathematics: A one-year study using exploratory structural equation modeling. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05706-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05706-9

Keywords: achievement emotions, mathematics education, psychometrics, exploratory structural equation modeling, measurement invariance, boredom, anxiety, elementary students, Control-Value Theory, questionnaire validation, longitudinal study, educational psychology

The study, led by Seçil Beyece İncazlı together with Ayça Fidan and Sevda Tüzün Özdemir, set out to answer a question that has puzzled educational psychologists for years: why do students who put off academic work so often end up glued to social media? The connection between the two behaviors has been documented repeatedly across countries and cultures, from Lebanon to Peru to Pakistan, but the emotional machinery linking them has remained murky. The Turkish team proposed that two emotional processes—boredom and alexithymia—might act as hidden bridges between the two behaviors.

Alexithymia, a term coined in the 1970s, describes a trait in which people struggle to identify, understand, and describe their own emotions. It is not a psychiatric disorder but a stable personality characteristic, typically measured with the twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale, the instrument used in this study. People high in alexithymia often feel vague inner states they cannot label, and previous research has linked the trait to problematic use of mobile phones, internet novels, and social networks—platforms that offer constant, low-effort stimulation when one’s own emotional world feels illegible.

Boredom, meanwhile, has undergone something of a scientific rehabilitation in the past decade. Researchers such as James Danckert and John Eastwood have reframed it not as a trivial state but as a signal: the uncomfortable awareness that one’s attention is unengaged and that the current activity holds no meaning. In academic settings, boredom is one of the most thoroughly studied achievement emotions. Reinhard Pekrun’s Control–Value Theory, which guided the new study, holds that emotions like boredom arise when students feel neither in control of their learning nor invested in its value—and that these emotions then shape how they behave, often driving them away from the task at hand.

To test whether these two emotional states connect procrastination to social media addiction, the researchers recruited 174 Turkish university students and asked them to complete an online survey measuring all four constructs: academic procrastination, boredom, alexithymia, and social media addiction, using validated Turkish-language versions of established scales. They then analyzed the data with a serial mediation model, a statistical technique that tests whether the effect of one variable on another travels through a chain of intermediate variables rather than a single shortcut. Specifically, they examined whether procrastination leads to boredom, which leads to alexithymia, which finally feeds social media addiction.

The results were striking in their clarity on one point and their nuance on another. Academic procrastination was positively associated with social media addiction, with a regression coefficient of 0.45, highly significant statistically, and the overall model accounted for 38 percent of the variance in social media addiction—a substantial share for research on human behavior. Boredom emerged as the star of the show: it significantly mediated the link between procrastination and social media addiction on its own, with an indirect effect whose confidence interval excluded zero. In plain terms, students who procrastinated reported more boredom, and that boredom was associated with more addictive social media use.

Alexithymia told a subtler story. On its own, it did not act as an independent mediator between procrastination and social media addiction. But when the researchers tested the full serial pathway—procrastination first breeding boredom, boredom then feeding into difficulty identifying feelings, and that emotional confusion finally spilling into compulsive platform use—the chain was statistically significant, though modest in size, with an indirect effect of 0.01 and a confidence interval of 0.00 to 0.04. The finding suggests that alexithymia is not the main highway between procrastination and scrolling, but it may function as a secondary on-ramp: once boredom has taken hold, students who cannot name what they are feeling may be particularly prone to seeking relief in the endless feed.

The theoretical implications reach back to Pekrun’s framework. Control–Value Theory predicts that when students perceive low control and low value in their studies, negative activating and deactivating emotions follow, and boredom is the classic deactivating emotion—one that drains motivation and encourages escape. The new findings fit this picture neatly: procrastination appears to generate an emotional vacuum, and social media, with its algorithmically optimized novelty, rushes in to fill it. Previous work has shown that boredom proneness predicts internet addiction through attentional bias toward social networks, and that boredom drives people to use social media specifically to pass time and escape unpleasant states. The Turkish study adds a serial dimension, showing that the emotional aftermath of avoidance can cascade into further difficulties with emotional awareness itself.

There are, of course, important caveats. The study is cross-sectional: all data were collected at a single point in time from a self-selected sample of 174 students, which means the direction of causality cannot be firmly established. It is entirely plausible that social media addiction also fuels procrastination and boredom, creating a feedback loop rather than a one-way street. Self-report questionnaires are vulnerable to common method bias, and the sample, drawn from a single country, may not generalize universally. The authors themselves note that no preregistration exists for the study and that data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. These limitations do not erase the findings, but they counsel against reading the mediation model as a proven causal mechanism.

Even so, the practical implications are tantalizing. If boredom is the more robust bridge between procrastination and problematic scrolling, then interventions that make academic tasks more engaging—or that teach students to tolerate and work through boredom rather than flee it—could break the cycle. The authors suggest that addressing academic boredom and supporting emotional awareness may be promising avenues for future research and practice. In an era when the average student’s attention is contested by platforms engineered to exploit every idle moment, understanding that the escape begins with an emotion rather than a decision may be the first step toward helping students reclaim both their time and their inner lives.

Subject of Research: The role of boredom and alexithymia in linking academic procrastination to social media addiction among university students

Article Title: Emotional processes in the association between academic procrastination and social media addiction: a serial mediation model of boredom and alexithymia

Article References: İncazlı, S. B., Fidan, A., & Özdemir, S. T. (2026). Emotional processes in the association between academic procrastination and social media addiction: a serial mediation model of boredom and alexithymia. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1558. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10116-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10116-6

Keywords: academic procrastination, social media addiction, boredom, alexithymia, serial mediation, university students, Control-Value Theory, educational psychology, emotion regulation, cyberpsychology, achievement emotions, Current Psychology