Meet The Team
The Boredom Lab is a team of curious, engaged, and collaborative researchers. Take a look at our biographies to better understand who we are and our ongoing research projects.
Principal Investigator
Photo by Paola Scattolon Photography
Dr. John Eastwood
Dr. Eastwood is a Clinical Psychologist and an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at York University (Toronto, Canada) where he trains future psychologists and conducts research on the intersection between cognition and emotion. He examineshow attention is allocated to affective and socially relevant information, the influence of mood and motivation on attention, and the affective consequences of attention failures. Dr. Eastwood seeks to better understand the feeling of thinking and how such feelings are an inextricable part of cognition. In particular, he studies how the feeling of boredom is associated with the unengaged mind. He recently obtained a research grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canadato explore the cognitive mechanisms underlying boredom. In his clinical practice, Dr. Eastwood provides psychotherapy to adults struggling with anxiety, depression, and relationship problems (eastwoodpsychologists.com).
Graduate Students
Adam Blake
Adam Blake is in the final year of his PhD in Clinical Psychology. He is currently creating a scale to measure the subjective experience of mental effort. He hopes this new scale, the Mental Effort Questionnaire (MEQ), will be a useful clinical tool in the treatment of ADHD. Adam also works part-time in private practice. As an integrative therapist, he draws on client-centered, emotion-focused, and cognitive-behavioural therapy to help cients with low mood, self-esteem, anxiety (ocd, social, generalized, panic), ADHD, academic/vocational and relationship concerns.
He is the recipient of two NSERC Research Awards and a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.
Dana Gorelik
I received my Bachelor of Arts Honours at York University in 2017. Currently, I am completing the second year of my master’s degree in the clinical psychology program at York University. My research focuses on investigating the cognitive causes of trait boredom, as well as on revising and evaluating a new measure of trait boredom. For my master’s thesis, we developed a psychometrically sound measure of trait boredom. Armed with a strong measure, I am currently investigating the relationship between trait boredom and performance on executive function, processing speed and attention tasks in older and younger adults.
Veerpal Bambrah
Veerpal is in the Adult Stream Clinical Psychology program; she is also completing select courses in the Clinical Developmental stream as well as the Qualitative Methods Diploma to diversify and widen her clinical and research skills. She is interested in further clarifying the concept of boredom propensity, particularly how it is similar or dissimilar to volitional (e.g., self-control), affective (e.g., self-directed attention and emotional awareness), motivational (e.g., intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation), and cognitive (e.g., attentional control) processes. Veerpal is also interested in the experience of anticipated mental effort, specifically the factors that shape individuals’ predictions of how effortful tasks will be and their accuracy (i.e., the discrepancy between anticipated and felt mental effort).
Research Assistants
Eva Friedman
Eva Friedman has received her Bachelor of Arts with Honours at York University in 2021. She joined the Boredom Lab to better understanding the self-regulation, executive functioning and boredom. Eva works on the development of the Boredom Lab’s website, conducts literature reviews and aids with developing and running studies.
Past Graduate Students
Jennifer Hunter
Andrew Hunter
Rotem Petranker
Past and Present Research Assistants
Sophia Gurovich
Connor Laforge
Maria Jelic
Chanel Frank
Samantha Rebelo