The development of the Metacognitions About Boredom Scale (MABS) and its role in problematic social media use
Mehdi Akbari, Roya Forootan, Zahra Tabar, Zsolt Demetrovics, Mark D. Griffiths · 2026
Read The development of the Metacognitions About Boredom Scale (MABS) and its role in problematic social media use by Mehdi Akbari, Roya Forootan, Zahra Tabar, Zsolt Demetrovics, Mark D. Griffiths (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13678398.txt.
Description
Mehdi Akbari and four co-authors built a new survey scale for what people believe about their own boredom, published in two thousand twenty-six. Beliefs about boredom can push people toward creative action or toward bad habits, such as compulsive social media use. The scale, called MABS, asks about both helpful and harmful views of feeling bored.
In a first study with more than one thousand Iranian adults, the scale split cleanly into two parts and gave steady scores over time and across sex and age. It predicted boredom and problem media use beyond general thought-style measures. In a second study with at-risk users, a set score on the harmful-beliefs part flagged those at risk of boredom-driven media overuse with high accuracy. The authors offer the scale for clinics and research.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Mehdi Akbari, Roya Forootan, Zahra Tabar, Zsolt Demetrovics, Mark D. Griffiths |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 81 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |