Annoyance

Annoyance is an unpleasant mental state that is characterized by such effects as irritation and distraction from one's conscious thinking. It can lead to emotions such as frustration and anger. The property of being easily annoyed is called petulance.

Psychology

Patrick is being annoyed by the person on his right.

Various reasons exist for why one finds particular stimuli annoying. Measurement of annoyance is highly subjective. As an attempt at measurement, psychological studies on annoyance often rely on their subjects' own ratings of levels of annoyance on a scale. Many stimuli that one is at first neutral to, or even finds pleasant, can turn into annoyances from repeated continued exposure. One can often encounter this phenomenon with such media as popular music, memes, commercials, and advertising jingles, which by their very nature are continually repeated over a period of weeks or months.

A study published in the International Journal of Conflict Management found that one's response to an annoyance, at least when the perceived cause is another person, escalate to more extreme levels as they go unresolved.^[1] It also found that one was more likely to blame the party who was causing the annoyance in the study, rather than one's self, for the annoyance as it escalated.

Psychological warfare can involve creating annoyances to distract and wear down the resistance of the target. For example, in 1993 the FBI played music "specifically selected for its irritation ability" on loudspeakers outside the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas in an attempt to bring about the surrender of David Koresh and his followers.^[2]

Software

Annoyances are used to measure how well a software program conforms to (or competes against) user expectations about how a particular feature or package should work. Individual annoyances are routinely archived and catalogued by users and reviewers. Such archives often include "annoyance busters" or "workarounds" that can be used to resolve or ameliorate the irritating effects. For top-selling software titles, archives of annoyances and workarounds are often published.

References

^ Dean G Pruitt, John C Parker, Joseph M Mikolic. Escalation as a reaction to persistent annoyance. International Journal of Conflict Management. Bowling Green: Jul 1997.Vol.8, Iss. 3; pg. 252, 19 pgs
^ Mark Potok. FBI grinds away at cult USA Today 14 April 1993 01A

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

[1] Dean G Pruitt, John C Parker, Joseph M Mikolic. Escalation as a reaction to persistent annoyance. International Journal of Conflict Management. Bowling Green: Jul 1997.Vol.8, Iss. 3; pg. 252, 19 pgs

[2] Mark Potok. FBI grinds away at cult USA Today 14 April 1993 01A

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v t e Emotions (list)
Emotions	Acceptance Admiration Adoration Aesthetic Affection Agitation Agony Amusement Anger Angst Anguish Annoyance Anticipation Anxiety Apathy Arousal Attraction Awe Belongingness Boredom Calmness Compassion Confidence Confusion Contempt Contentment Courage Cruelty Curiosity Defeat Depression Desire Disappointment Disgust Distrust Doubt Ecstasy Embarrassment vicarious Emotion work Empathy Emptiness Enthrallment Enthusiasm Envy Euphoria Excitement Faith Fear Flow Frustration Gratification Gratitude Greed Grief Guilt Happiness Joie de vivre Hatred Hiraeth Homesickness Hope Horror Hostility Humiliation Hygge Hysteria Ikigai (sense of purpose) Indulgence Infatuation Insecurity Inspiration Interest Irritation Isolation Jealousy Joy Kindness Loneliness Love limerence at first sight Lust Mono no aware Neglect Nostalgia Outrage Panic Passion Pity self-pity Pleasure Pride grandiosity hubris insult vanity Rage Regret Rejection Relief Remorse Resentment Revenge Sadness melancholy Saudade Schadenfreude Sehnsucht Sentimentality Shame Shock Shyness Social connection Sorrow Spite Stress chronic Suffering Surprise Sympathy Trust Wonder sense of wonder Worry
Worldviews	Cynicism Defeatism Nihilism Optimism Pessimism Reclusion Weltschmerz
Related	Affect consciousness in education measures in psychology Affective computing forecasting neuroscience science spectrum Affectivity positive negative Appeal to emotion Amygdala hijack Emotion and art and memory and music and sex and sleep classification evolution expressed functional accounts group homeostatic in animals perception recognition in conversation regulation interpersonal work Emotional aperture bias blackmail competence conflict contagion detachment dysregulation eating exhaustion expression and gender intelligence and bullying Empathy quotient intimacy isolation lability labor lateralization literacy prosody reasoning responsivity security symbiosis thought method well-being Emotionality bounded Emotions and culture history in decision-making in the workplace in virtual communication moral self-conscious social social sharing sociology Feeling Group affective tone Interactions between the emotional and executive brain systems Jealousy in art Meta-emotion Pathognomy Pathos Social emotional development Stoic passions Theory affect appraisal constructed emotion discrete emotion somatic marker
Italics indicate emotion names in foreign languages

Psychology

Software

See also

References