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Engaged Workers Report Twice As Much Job Creation
Business Insider: Employees who are in engaged in their work and workplace are twice as likely to report their organization is hiring new workers as those who are actively disengaged. Workers who are emotionally disconnected from their work and workplace are far more likely to report their organization is letting people go than those who are engaged. Americans report these substantial differences in their organization's hiring practices even though, collectively, Gallup finds overall U.S. job creation holding steady in recent months. Read the whole story: Business Insider
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Narcissists Look Like Good Leaders—But They Aren’t!
Narcissists rise to the top. That’s because other people think their qualities—confidence, dominance, authority, and self-esteem—make them good leaders. Is that true? “Our research shows that the opposite seems to be true,” says Barbora Nevicka, a PhD candidate in organizational psychology, describing a new study she undertook with University of Amsterdam colleagues Femke Ten Velden, Annebel De Hoogh, and Annelies Van Vianen. The study found that the narcissists’ preoccupation with their own brilliance inhibits a crucial element of successful group decision-making and performance: the free and creative exchange of information and ideas.
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Fighting the Fear of Public Speaking
The Wall Street Journal: Everyone is afraid of something. Spiders, heights, angry bees. But while spiders and bees can make a picnic challenging, they usually don’t get in the way of doing a job. Unfortunately, my fear is public speaking. At one point, my phobia got so bad that when I gave presentations, my right eye would twitch. Not only would I get nervous about my talk, but I would also stress about the possibility of the eye-twitch emerging, which made it hard to actually present my information. (Try reading notes through an eyeball that has a mind of its own.) The stressing, of course, just made the twitch inevitable. It was a vicious circle. Read more: The Wall Street Journal
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The ultimate brain-boosting evening
Men's Health UK: The area of your brain responsible for memory formation is the hippocampus – and the bigger yours the better. Researchers from the University of Illinois and the University of Pittsburgh recently discovered a strong correlation between physical fitness and hippocampus size. "If you want to keep your memory and the rest of your mental skills in shape, you need to feed your brain through regular exercise," says Tony Buzan, inventor of Mind Mapping and author of over 100 books on the brain. Read more: Men's Health UK
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Trying Out New Identities Key to Video Games’ Appeal: Study
U.S. News & World Report: One reason why people worldwide spend 3 billion hours per week playing video games may be because the games allow them to "try on" characteristics they might like to have, a new study suggests. The research included hundreds of casual game players and nearly a thousand dedicated players who were asked about their motivation for playing, as well as their post-game emotions. The British researchers found that players' enjoyment seemed to be greater when there was an overlap between their actual self and their "ideal" self. That meant that being able to adopt a new identity during a game made players feel better about themselves and less negative. Read more: U.S.
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Social Class as Culture
Social class is more than just how much money you have. It’s also the clothes you wear, the music you like, the school you go to—and has a strong influence on how you interact with others, according to the authors of a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. People from lower classes have fundamentally different ways of thinking about the world than people in upper classes—a fact that should figure into debates on public policy, according to the authors.
