|
Professional Guided
Hypnosis, Self Help, Health Issues,
Personal Development, Self Improvement:
hundreds of specific areas to help you
right now ... Certified Hypnosis Downloads
for Self Help Users as well as Hypnosis
Scripts / Hypnosis MP3s for Practitioners
& Trainees ... CLICK HERE
Wellness
News ... what the
editors are researching ...
Self-affirmations
may calm jitters and boost performance
- When the stakes are high, people in
positions of low power may perform better by
using self-affirmations to boost their
confidence.
"Most people have experienced a time in their
lives when they aren't performing up to their
potential. They take a test or have a
performance review at work, but something
holds them back," says lead researcher Sonia
Kang, Ph.D. "Performance in these situations
is closely related to how we are expected to
behave."
When participants were in a position of high
power, they tended to perform better under
pressure, while those with less power
performed worse. Self-affirmations, however,
helped to level the playing field and
effectively reduced the power
differences.
"You
should reflect on things that you know are
good about yourself," says Kang, an assistant
professor of organizational behavior and human
resource management at the University of
Toronto. "Anyone has the potential to do
really well. It's how you respond under
pressure that makes a key difference."
"Anytime you have low expectations for your
performance, you tend to sink down and meet
those low expectations," Kang says.
"Self-affirmation is a way to neutralize that
threat."
Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Neuropsychology:
produce a significant improvement
- Neuropsychologists have shown that even a
brief sleep can significantly improve
retention of learned material in memory. Newly
learned information is effectively given a
label, making it easier to recall that
information at some later time. In short, a
person's memory of something is stronger, the
greater the number of sleep spindles appearing
in the
EEG. 'A short nap at the office
or in school is enough to significantly
improve learning
success. Wherever people are in a
learning environment, we should think
seriously about the positive effects of
sleep,' says Axel
Mecklinger. Saarland University
Have
a sense of purpose in
life? Having a high sense of purpose in
life may lower your risk of heart disease
and
stroke. The new analysis defined purpose
in life as a sense of meaning and direction,
and a feeling that life is worth living.
Previous research has linked purpose to
psychological health and well-being, but the
new analysis found that a high sense of
purpose is associated with a 23 percent
reduction in death from all causes and a 19
percent reduced risk of heart attack, stroke,
or the need for coronary artery bypass surgery
(CABG) or a cardiac stenting procedure.
"Developing and refining your sense of purpose
could protect your heart health and
potentially save your life," says lead study
author Randy Cohen, MD, a preventive
cardiologist at Mount Sinai St. Luke's and
Mount Sinai Roosevelt. "Our study shows there
is a strong relationship between having a
sense of purpose in life and protection from
dying or having a cardiovascular event. As
part of our overall health, each of us needs
to ask ourselves the critical question of 'do
I have a sense of purpose in my life?' If not,
you need to work toward the important goal of
obtaining one for your overall well-being."
Mount Sinai St. Luke's and Mount Sinai School
of Medicine
Leaders
- Leaders of a group synchronize their
brain activity with that of their followers
during communication.
Great leaders are often good communicators. In
the process of communication, the relationship
between leaders and their followers develops
spontaneously according to new research from
the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive
and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the State
Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and
Learning and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain
Research in Beijing.
When a member becomes the group leader, the
leader's brain activity in the left
temporo-parietal junction, known as
representing others' mental states, begins to
synchronize with that in the same area of
their followers.
The findings also suggest that interpersonal
neural synchronization is more likely due to
the communication skills of the leader and
less likely due to how much they speak. Thus,
in a group of peers, the individual who says
the right things at the right time usually
emerges as the leader.
These findings also confirm the assumption
that the quality, not the quantity, of
communication determines who will emerge as
leader of a group.
Outside
CEOs could rejuvenate struggling businesses
- CEOs hired from outside a company tend to
spend more money on research and development,
while CEOs hired from within are likely to
make large, strategic acquisitions.
According to the study, while 78 percent of
new CEOs are selected from within the
organization, internally and externally chosen
CEOs execute different financial strategies
that could be best-suited for companies with
different needs.
University of Missouri
Work
site wellness centers
- As employees and employers face higher
health care costs, work site wellness are
becoming increasingly more important to help
control the costs of health care and encourage
healthy lifestyle behaviors among the
workforce.
"A well-planned comprehensive wellness center
can engage and retain members which can
ultimately lead to important savings in health
care costs and reductions in body mass index
(BMI)," says lead researcher Bijan Borah,
Ph.D., of the Mayo Clinic Robert D. and
Patricia E. Kern Center for the Science of
Health Care Delivery.
Mayo Clinic. Journal of Occupational and
Environmental Medicine
Creative
genius - The literary great Marcel
Proust wore ear-stoppers because he was unable
to filter out irrelevant noise -- and lined
his bedroom with cork to attenuate sound.
Research suggests why the inability to shut
out competing sensory information while
focusing on the creative project at hand might
have been so acute for geniuses such as
Proust, Franz Kafka, Charles Darwin, Anton
Chekhov and many others.
Northwestern University. Neuropsychologia
Workplace
lifestyle intervention program improves
health
- Employees participating in the program lost
weight and reduced their risk for diabetes and
heart disease.
University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of
Public Health. Journal of Occupational
and Environmental
Medicine
Chance
as a motivator - Can uncertainty
motivate people to work harder? According to a
new study, people will often put in more
effort to obtain uncertain rewards.
"When comparing the time, money, and effort
people invest in order to qualify for either a
certain or an uncertain reward, we find that
the uncertain reward is more motivating than
the certain reward, an effect we dubbed the
motivating-uncertainty effect," write authors
Luxi Shen (Chinese University of Hong Kong),
Ayelet Fishbach, and Christopher K. Hsee (both
University of Chicago Booth School of
Business).
Journal of Consumer Research
Change
the way you think - Does your mind
wander when performing monotonous, repetitive
tasks? Of course! But daydreaming involves
more than just beating back boredom. A
wandering mind can impart
a distinct cognitive advantage.
Scientists
demonstrated how an external stimulus of
low-level electricity can literally change the
way we think, producing a measurable up-tick
in the rate at which daydreams - or
spontaneous, self-directed thoughts and
associations - occur. Along the way, they made
another surprising discovery: that while
daydreams offer a welcome "mental escape" from
boring tasks, they also have a positive,
simultaneous effect on task performance.
Bar-Ilan University, Cognitive Neuroscience
Laboratory. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.
Trying
to project an image of
success? - "When consumers experience a
psychological threat to how they would like to
see themselves, buying products that signal
accomplishment in the same area of their life
could ironically cause them to dwell on their
shortcomings. This can strip consumers of
their mental resources and impair their
self-control," write authors Monika Lisjak
(Erasmus University), Andrea Bonezzi (New York
University), Soo Kim (Cornell University), and
Derek D. Rucker (Kellogg School of Management,
Northwestern University).
"Consumption
can sometimes compensate for our blunders and
failures, but this doesn't always work.
Consumers who use products to boost their
sense of self-worth tend to dwell on their
shortcomings and their ability to exert
self-control is impaired. After experiencing a
setback in one area of their life, consumers
might be better off boosting their sense of
self in a different area of their life. For
example, a consumer whose intelligence is
undermined might be better off signaling their
self-worth socially rather than trying to
assert their intelligence," the authors
conclude.
Journal of Consumer Research.
Have a 'learning' attitude for more success
- Job seekers with attitudes focused on
"learning" from the job-seeking process will
have more success finding their dream jobs.
"Attitude means a lot," said Daniel Turban, a
professor of management at the MU Trulaske
College of Business. "In our study, we found
that job seekers who have a 'learning goal
orientation' or a natural disposition to learn
from every situation in life, tend to be more
successful in achieving their career goals. We
also found that this disposition is not just
influenced by genetics; it can be acquired."
University of Missouri and Lehigh University.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes.
Practice
really does make perfect - Researchers
have shown that follow-through - such as when
swinging a golf club or tennis racket - can
help us to learn two different skills at once,
or to learn a single skill faster. The
research provides new insight into the way
tasks are learned, and could have implications
for rehabilitation, such as re-learning motor
skills following a stroke.
University of Cambridge, University of
Plymouth. Current Biology.
Cognitive
training can improve brain performance -
"Previous research has shown that growing up
in poverty can shape the wiring and even
physical dimensions of a young child's brain,
with negative effects on language, learning
and attention," said Dr. Jacquelyn Gamino,
director of the Center for BrainHealth's
Adolescent Reasoning Initiative and assistant
research professor in the School of Behavioral
and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas
at Dallas. "What this work shows is that there
is hope for students in poverty to catch up
with their peers not living in poverty."
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Herd
mentality: Are we programmed to make bad
decisions? - A natural desire to be part
of the 'in crowd' could damage our ability to
make the right decisions.
"The result is that groups evolve to be
unresponsive to changes in their environment
and spend too much time copying one another,
and not making their own decisions," said Dr
Colin
Torney. University of Exeter, Princeton
University, Sorbonne Universites, Institute
for Research in Computer Science and
Automation.
Royal Society journal Interface.
More
progress than setbacks - People tend to
believe good behaviors are more beneficial in
reaching goals than bad behaviors are in
obstructing goals. A dieter, for instance,
might think refraining from eating ice cream
helps his weight-management goal more than
eating ice cream hurts it, overestimating
movement toward versus away from his target.
A lapse while working toward a goal, referred
to as goal-inconsistent behavior, doesn't feel
as damaging to the perpetrator and can be
redeemed. Successes while working toward a
goal, referred to as goal-consistent behavior,
feel like big accomplishments.
"Basically what our research shows is that
people tend to accentuate the positive and
downplay the negative when considering how
they're doing in terms of goal pursuit," said
Professor Margaret C. Campbell. University of
Colorado at Boulder.
Journal of Consumer Research.
Wealth,
power or lack thereof at heart of many
mental disorders - Researchers have linked
inflated or deflated feelings of self-worth to
such afflictions as bipolar disorder,
narcissistic personality disorder, anxiety and
depression, providing yet more evidence that
the widening gulf between rich and poor
can be bad for your health.
"We
found that it is important to consider the
motivation to pursue power, beliefs
about how much power one has attained,
pro-social and aggressive strategies for
attaining power, and emotions related to
attaining power," said Sheri Johnson, a UC
Berkeley psychologist.
"People
prone to depression or anxiety reported
feeling little sense of pride in their
accomplishments and little sense of power,"
Johnson said. "In contrast, people at risk for
mania tended to report high levels of pride
and an emphasis on the pursuit of power
despite interpersonal costs."
Studies have long established that feelings of
powerlessness and helplessness weaken the
immune system, making one more vulnerable to
physical and mental ailments. Conversely, an
inflated sense of power is among the behaviors
associated with bipolar disorder and
narcissistic personality disorder, which can
be both personally and socially corrosive.
University of California - Berkeley.
Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory,
Research and
Practice.
Office
stress? - When office stress increases,
some employees may wait weeks or months before
engaging in 'counterproductive work
behaviors'.
San Francisco State University. Journal
of Occupational and Organizational
Psychology.
Protect
against cognitive impairment - Some
people suffer incipient dementia as they get
older. To make up for this loss, the brain's
cognitive reserve is put to the test.
Researchers have studied what factors can help
to improve this ability and they conclude that
having a higher level of vocabulary is one
such factor.
"This led us to the conclusion that a higher
level of vocabulary, as a measure of cognitive
reserve, can protect against cognitive
impairment," said Cristina Lojo
Seoane. University of Santiago de Compostela.
FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and
Technology.
Anales de Psicología (Annals of
Psychology).
Boost
mental performance - Engaging brain
areas linked to so-called “off-task” mental
activities (such as mind-wandering and
reminiscing) can actually boost performance on
some challenging mental tasks.
Cornell University neuroscientist Nathan
Spreng. Journal of Neuroscience.
Mindfulness associated with better health
- Persons reporting higher degrees of
awareness of their present feelings and
experiences had better health. The research
suggests that interventions to improve
mindfulness could benefit cardiovascular
health.
Brown University. International Journal
of Behavioral Medicine.
Personality
influences career success - "Our study
shows that it is not only your own personality
that influences the experiences that lead to
greater occupational success, but that your
spouse's personality matters too," said Joshua
Jackson, PhD, assistant professor of
psychology in Arts & Sciences.
Although we marry "for better for worse, for
richer for poorer," this study demonstrates
that the personality traits of the spouse we
choose may play a role in determining whether
our chosen career makes us richer or poorer.
Washington University in St. Louis.
Psychological Science.
Experiences
make you happier - To get the most
enjoyment out of our dollar, science tells us
to focus our discretionary spending on
experiences such as travel over material
goods. A study shows that the enjoyment we
derive from experiential purchases may begin
even before we buy.
Cornell University. Psychological Science.
Enjoying
the possibility of defeat - Winning
isn't everything, and in fact can even be a
bit boring. Some people actually enjoy a game
of tennis or poker more if their mettle is
tested by a strong opponent – regardless of
the outcome. It's the suspense and uncertainty
of a close game that often brings them back
for more.
Istanbul Sehir University. Motivation and
Emotion.
Personal
setbacks: Do you bounce back or give
up? - Sometimes when people get
upsetting news – such as a failing exam grade
or a negative job review – they decide
instantly to do better the next time. In other
situations that are equally disappointing, the
same people may feel inclined to just give up.
How can similar setbacks produce such
different reactions? It may come down to how
much control we feel we have over what
happened.
Rutgers University. Neuron.
Part
of the brain stays 'youthful' into older age
- At least one part of the human brain may be
able to process information the same way in
older age as it does in the prime of life.
"Our studies have found that older and younger
adults perform in a similar way on a range of
visual and non-visual tasks that measure
spatial attention," says Dr Joanna Brooks, who
conducted the study as a Visiting Research
Fellow with the University of Adelaide's
School of Psychology and the School of
Medicine.
12th International Cognitive Neuroscience
Conference.
“Moral
victories” might spare you from losing again
- It's human nature to hate losing.
Unfortunately, it’s also human nature to
overreact to a loss, potentially abandoning a
solid strategy and thus increasing your
chances of losing the next time around.
Brigham Young University. Management
Science.
Brain's dynamic duel underlies win-win
choices - People choosing between two or
more equally positive outcomes experience
paradoxical feelings of pleasure and anxiety,
feelings associated with activity in different
regions of the brain.
Amitai Shenhav, an associate research scholar
at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute at
Princeton University. Professor of Psychology
and Neuroscience Randy Buckner.
Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
How
you cope with stress - “Our study is
among the first to show that it’s not the
number of stressors, but your reaction
to them that determines the likelihood of
experiencing insomnia,” said lead author Vivek
Pillai, PhD, research fellow at the Sleep
Disorders & Research Center at Henry Ford
Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. “While a
stressful event can lead to a bad night of
sleep, it’s what you do in response to stress
that can be the difference between a few bad
nights and chronic insomnia.”
The study identified potential targets for
therapeutic interventions to improve
coping responses to stress and reduce the risk
of insomnia. In particular, they noted that
mindfulness-based therapies have shown
considerable promise in suppressing
cognitive intrusion and improving
sleep. The American Academy of Sleep
Medicine.
Sleep.
Too
much talent - As the FIFA World Cup
kicks off and the NBA finals "heat" up, new
research suggests that there is such a thing
as having too much talent on a sports team.
The research indicates that, after a certain
point, the addition of more superstar talent
to a team can actually be detrimental,
resulting in poorer team performance.
"Like sports teams, teams in organizations
vary in their levels of interdependence. When
team success merely depends on the
accumulation of individual performance (e.g.
sales teams), hiring and staffing could simply
focus on getting the most talented individuals
on board," Swaab explains.
INSEAD Professor Roderick Swaab.
Psychological Science.
Get
groups more fired up for team work -
Chairs provide great support during long
meetings, but they may also be holding us
back. Standing during meetings boosts the
excitement around creative group processes and
reduces people's tendency to defend their
turf, according to a study that used wearable
sensors.
Get Up, Stand Up: The Effects of a
Non-Sedentary Workspace on Information
Elaboration and Group Performance, by Andrew
P. Knight and Markus Baer.
Social Psychological and Personality
Science.
A
Sense of Purpose May Add Years to Your Life
- Feeling that you have a sense of purpose in
life may help you live longer, no matter what
your age.
Patrick Hill: “Our findings point to the fact
that finding a direction for life, and setting
overarching goals for what you want to achieve
can help you actually live longer, regardless
of when you find your purpose,” says Hill. “So
the earlier someone comes to a direction for
life, the earlier these protective effects may
be able to occur.”
Patrick Hill of Carleton University in Canada
and Nicholas Turiano of the University of
Rochester Medical Center.
Psychological Science.
Spontaneous
thoughts - Spontaneous thoughts,
intuitions, dreams and quick impressions. We
all have these seemingly random thoughts
popping into our minds on a daily basis. The
question is what do we make of these
unplanned, spur-of-the-moment thoughts? Do we
view them as coincidental wanderings of a
restless mind, or as revealing meaningful
insight into ourselves?
Spontaneous thoughts are perceived to provide
potent self-insight and can influence judgment
and decisions more than similar, more
deliberate kinds of thinking – even on
important topics such as commitment to current
romantic partners.
Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard
Business School. Journal of Experimental
Psychology:
General.
Women's
empowerment and Olympic success - New
research shows that nations with greater
women's empowerment win more medals and send
more athletes to the Summer Olympics.
Grand Valley State University. Journal of
Sports Economics.
Success
breeds success - Success really does
breed success - up to a point. It has been
observed that similar people experience
divergent success trajectories, with some
repeatedly succeeding and others repeatedly
failing. Some suggest initial success can
catalyse further achievements, creating a
positive feedback loop, while others attribute
a string of successes to inherent talent. To
test these views the researchers conducted
four experiments.
Dr Soong Moon Kang (University College London
Management Science & Innovation, UK). Dr
Arnout van de Rijt (Institute for Advanced
Computational Science, Stony Brook University,
USA).
Accurate
decision-making - Princeton University
researchers report that smaller groups tend to
make more accurate decisions while larger
assemblies may become excessively focused on
only certain pieces of information.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Interest
and Success - Maintaining an interest in
the goals you pursue can improve your work and
reduce burnout. "Our research shows that
interest is important in the process of
pursuing goals. It allows us to perform at
high levels without wearing out," said Paul
O'Keefe, who conducted the studies as a
doctoral student in Duke University's
Department of Psychology & Neuroscience,
along with associate professor Lisa
Linnenbrink-Garcia. The studies suggest that
if people experience activities as both
enjoyable and personally significant - two
important components of interest - their
chance of success increases.
Paul A.
O'Keefe, Lisa Linnenbrink-Garcia, Department
of Psychology & Neuroscience, Duke
University. "The Role of Interest in
Optimizing Performance and Self-Regulation."
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Benefiting
from creative activity - Creative
pursuits away from work seem to have a direct
effect on factors such as creative problem
solving and helping others while on the job,
said Kevin Eschleman, an assistant professor
of psychology. "A lot of organizations carve
time out where they talk about physical heath
and exercise and eating habits, but they can
also include in that a discussion of mental
health and the importance of recovery and
creative activity," he said.
San Francisco State University. Journal
of Occupational and Organizational
Psychology.
Procrastination
- Procrastination and impulsivity are
genetically linked, suggesting that the two
traits stem from similar evolutionary
origins. The research indicates that the
traits are related to our ability to
successfully pursue and juggle
goals.
“Everyone procrastinates at least sometimes,
but we wanted to explore why some people
procrastinate more than others and why
procrastinators seem more likely to make rash
actions and act without thinking,” explains
psychological scientist and study author
Daniel Gustavson of the University of Colorado
Boulder.
Psychological Science.
Mentally
challenging jobs may keep your mind sharp
- A mentally demanding job may stress you out
but can provide important benefits after you
retire.
"Our study suggests that certain kinds of
challenging jobs have the potential to enhance
and protect workers' mental functioning in
later life," said Gwenith Fisher, a faculty
associate at the University of Michigan
Institute for Social Research and assistant
professor of psychology at Colorado State
University.
University of Michigan. Occupational
Health Psychology.
Difference
between winning and losing - "The goal
of the program is to train the brain to better
respond to the inputs that it gets from the
eye," Aaron Seitz says. "As with most other
aspects of our function, our potential is
greater than our normative level of
performance. When we go to the gym and
exercise, we are able to increase our physical
fitness; it's the same thing with the brain.
By exercising our mental processes we can
promote our mental fitness."
... "Understanding the rules of brain
plasticity unlocks great potential for
improvement of health and wellbeing," Seitz
says.
University of California, Riverside.
Current Biology.
Feeling
'in control' can help you live longer -
People who feel in control and believe they
can achieve goals despite hardships are more
likely to live longer and healthier
lives. Brandeis University and University of
Rochester. Health Psychology.
Training
your brain using neurofeedback - A new
brain-imaging technique enables people to
"watch" their own brain activity in real time
and to control or adjust function in
predetermined brain regions. The study
demonstrates that magnetoencephalography can
be used as a potential therapeutic tool to
control and train specific targeted brain
regions. This advanced brain-imaging
technology has important clinical applications
for numerous neurological and neuropsychiatric
conditions.
McGill University. Montreal Neurological
Institute and Hospital. Neuro,
NeuroImage.
Enjoy
Life - People who enjoy life maintain
better physical function in daily activities
and keep up faster walking speeds as they age,
compared with people who enjoy life less.
Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Problem-solving
success - "We thought at first it would
be better to have innovators around you," said
IU cognitive scientist Robert Goldstone,
professor in the Department of Psychological
and Brain Sciences in the College of Arts and
Sciences at IU Bloomington. "But in our
experiments, if people are surrounded by
imitators, they actually do better."
"Social Learning Strategies in Networked
Groups" Cognitive Science. Indiana
University.
In
the blink of an eye - Imagine seeing a
dozen pictures flash by in a fraction of a
second. You might think it would be impossible
to identify any images you see for such a
short time. However, a team of neuroscientists
from MIT has found that the human brain can
process entire images that the eye sees for as
little as 13 milliseconds.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Attention, Perception, and
Psychophysics.
Health
and wealth connected? - We ring in the
new year with hopes of being healthy, wealthy,
and wise. A new study led by SDSU professor
John Ayers suggests that from a public health
standpoint, health and wealth may be
connected.
San Diego State University. American Journal
of Preventive Medicine.
How
stories may change the brain -
“Stories shape our lives and in some cases
help define a person,” says neuroscientist
Gregory Berns, lead author of the study and
the director of Emory’s Center for
Neuropolicy.
Just thinking about running, for instance, can
activate the neurons associated with the
physical act of running.
“The neural changes that we found associated
with physical sensation and movement systems
suggest that reading a novel can transport you
into the body of the protagonist,” Berns says.
“We already knew that good stories can put you
in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense.
Now we’re seeing that something may also be
happening biologically.”
Emory University. Brain Connectivity.
Self-worth
boosts ability to overcome poverty - For
people in poverty, remembering better times -
such as past success -
improves brain functioning by several IQ
points and increases their willingness to seek
help from crucial
help services.
The findings suggest that reconnecting the
poor with feelings of self-worth
reduces the powerful stigma and psychological
barriers that make it harder for low-income
individuals to make good decisions or access
the very assistance services that can help
them get back on their feet.
"This study shows that surprisingly simple
acts of self-affirmation can improve
the cognitive function and behavioural
outcomes of people in poverty," says
University of British Columbia professor
Jiaying Zhao.
Zhao and co-authors Eldar Shafir of Princeton
University and Crystal Hall of University of
Washington theorize that self-affirmation
alleviates the mentally overwhelming stigma
and cognitive threats of poverty, which can
impair reasoning, cause bad decisions and
perpetuate financial woes.
This study builds on previous research by Zhao
and colleagues from Princeton, Harvard and
University of Warwick, which found that
poverty consumes so much mental energy that
those in poor circumstances have little
remaining brainpower to concentrate on other
areas of life.
As a result, less "mental bandwidth" remains
for education, training, time-management,
assistance programs and other steps that could
help break out of the cycles of poverty.
University of British Columbia. Psychological
Science.
Goals
affect feelings of pride and shame after
success and failure - According to
researchers at Penn State and Australia's
Central Queensland University, a person's
goals at the outset of a competence-based
task, such as a sporting event, can influence
how much shame or pride he or she feels upon
completion of the task. Sport, Exercise and
Performance Psychology.
Wellbeing
at Work ... - Research reveals positive
aspects of working life – such as high levels
of control at work, good support from
supervisors and colleagues, and feeling cared
for – support higher levels of wellbeing among
workers.
Queen Mary University of London.
Creativity
... -
Researchers
have created a test that measures a person’s
creativity from spoken words.
Neuroscientist Jeremy Gray is an
associate professor of psychology at Michigan
State University Department of Psychology and
Neuroscience Program. Co-researchers are
Ranjani Prabhakaran from the National
Institute of Mental Health and Adam Green from
Georgetown University.
Neuroscientists
discover new 'mini-neural computer' in the
brain
Dendrites, the branch-like projections of
neurons, were once thought to be passive
wiring in the brain. But now researchers at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill have shown that these dendrites do more
than relay information from one neuron to the
next. They actively process information,
multiplying the brain's computing power.
"Suddenly, it's as if the processing power of
the brain is much greater than we had
originally thought," said Spencer Smith, PhD,
an assistant professor in the UNC School of
Medicine.
University of North Carolina Health Care.
Nature.
Mercedes-Benz
Becomes Global Sponsor - Billy Payne, Chairman of Augusta
National Golf Club and the Masters Tournament,
announced that Mercedes-Benz will enter into a
new worldwide partnership with the Masters,
beginning at the 2014 Tournament. Having been
an International Partner of the Masters since
2008, Mercedes-Benz will now become a Global
Sponsor, joining AT&T and IBM.
"The Masters is the most prestigious golf
tournament in the world and this partnership
aligns with our strategy to place
Mercedes-Benz at the forefront of premier
sporting events," said Stephen Cannon,
President and CEO of Mercedes-Benz USA.
"Mercedes-Benz has a long-standing history
with golf and to be associated as a Global
Sponsor of the Masters strengthens our
existing ties with one of the world's most
popular and widely played sports."
Mercedes-Benz USA.
Self-affirmation
improves problem-solving under stress -
It's no secret that stress increases your
susceptibility to health problems, and it also
impacts your ability to solve problems and be
creative. But methods to prevent associated
risks and effects have been less clear – until
now.
New research provides evidence that
self-affirmation can protect against the
damaging effects of stress on problem-solving
performance. Understanding that
self-affirmation - the process of identifying
and focusing on one's most important values -
boosts stressed individuals' problem-solving
abilities will help guide future research and
the development of educational interventions.
Carnegie
Mellon University.
Distance
may be key in successful
negotiations - Adding physical distance
between people during negotiations may lead to
more mutually beneficial outcomes, according
to new research from The University of Texas
at Austin.
Psychologist Marlone Henderson examined how
negotiations that don't take place in person
may be affected by distance. He compared
distant negotiators (several thousand feet
away) with those who are nearby (a few feet
away) in three separate studies. While much
work has examined the consequences of
different forms of non-face-to-face
communication, previous research has not
examined the effects of physical distance
between negotiators independent of other
factors. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology
Powerful
Postures - According to research from
the Kellogg School of Management at
Northwestern University, posture plays an
important role in determining whether people
act as though they are really in charge. The
research finds that “posture expansiveness,”
or positioning oneself in a way that opens up
the body and takes up space, activates a sense
of power that produces behavioral changes in a
person independent of their actual rank or
hierarchical role in an organization.
“Powerful Postures Versus
Powerful Roles: Which Is the Proximate
Correlate of Thought and Behavior?”
Psychological Science
Coaching
with compassion can 'light up' human
thoughts -
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University
used an fMRI to document reactions in the
human brain to compassionate and critical
coaching methods. Students tended to activate
areas of the brain associated with
openness to learning when working with
coaches who inspired them. Students tended to
shut down when coaches were perceived as
judgmental.
Case Western
Reserve University
|