We report new evidence on the emotional, demographic, and situational correlates of boredom from a rich experience sample capturing 1.1 million emotional and time-use reports from 3,867 U.S. adults. Subjects report boredom in 2.8% of the 30-min sampling periods, and 63% of participants report experiencing boredom at least once across the 10-day sampling period. We find that boredom is more likely to co-occur with negative, rather than positive, emotions, and is particularly predictive of loneliness, anger, sadness, and worry. Boredom is more prevalent among men, youths, the unmarried, and those of lower income. We find that differences in how such demographic groups spend their time account for up to one third of the observed differences in overall boredom. The importance of situations in predicting boredom is additionally underscored by the high prevalence of boredom in specific situations involving monotonous or difficult tasks (e.g., working, studying) or contexts where one's autonomy might be constrained (e.g., time with coworkers, afternoons, at school). Overall, our findings are consistent with cognitive accounts that cast boredom as emerging from situations in which engagement is difficult, and are less consistent with accounts that exclusively associate boredom with low arousal or with situations lacking in meaning. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Individuals typically believe that children increase parental happiness (see Hansen, 2012), but decades of research have found little support for this contention (e.g., Dolan, Peasgood, & White, 2008). In a recent article, Nelson, Kushlev, English, Dunn, and Lyubomirsky (2013) addressed this issue with analyses of data from the World Values Survey (WVS; 2006) and an experience-sampling data set (Carstensen et al., 2011). Though Nelson et al. carefully avoided making causal claims, they nevertheless concluded that the results provide "strong evidence challenging the widely held [academic] perception that children are a source of reduced well-being" (p. 8).In this Commentary, we report a reanalysis of the data, which suggests that it is premature to abandon the idea that children reduce happiness. A reassessment of Studies 1 and 2 in Nelson et al., prompted by econometric and conceptual concerns, failed to support the conclusions of the authors. 1 Parents did report higher levels of wellbeing than nonparents did, but the difference appears to have been entirely driven by omitted factors-such as marital status and parental age-that were highly correlated with both the presence of children and well-being. We found that controlling for such factors, which are available in the data, erases the positive relationship between well-being and parenthood. A reanalysis seems especially critical in light of the importance that Nelson et al. attribute to these findings for "those planning a family" and for "emerging evolutionary perspectives" of parenting (p. 9).