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How Your Hobbies Impact Your Work Performance
Inc. Magazine: Hopefully, you don’t need an extra reason to enjoy your hobbies, but if you happen to be one of the many professionals who are struggling to keep their constant busyness from encroaching on their favorite activities, a new study might give you a motivation boost to keep up with your pastime of choice. The research out of San Francisco State University looked at how creative activities like knitting, cooking, painting, photography, gardening or what-have-you affect work performance.
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Accents Can Carry Over When You Switch Between Languages
Switching back and forth between two different languages presents a cognitive challenge that can trip up even the most fluent bilingual speakers. Researcher Matthew Goldrick of Northwestern University and colleagues wondered whether the disruptions caused by language-switching might extend beyond the ability to produce words to influence how bilingual speakers actually pronounce words. They hypothesized that switching between languages might lead to accent “contamination,” whereby a speaker’s native language influences the subsequent pronunciation of words in a nonnvative language.
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Relationship Satisfaction Linked with Changing Use of Contraception
Women’s sexual satisfaction in long-term heterosexual relationships may be influenced by changes in hormonal contraceptive use, research from the University of Stirling shows. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, was carried out by researchers from the universities of Stirling, Glasgow, Newcastle, Northumbria and Charles University in Prague. The team looked at a sample of 365 couples, and investigated how satisfaction levels — in both sexual and non-sexual aspects of long-term relationships — were influenced by women’s current and historical use of hormonal contraception.
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You Are What You Eat
The Economist: Many psychological studies conducted over the past two decades suggest Westerners have a more individualistic, analytic and abstract mental life than do East Asians. Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain this. One, that modernisation promotes individualism, falls at the first hurdle: Japan, an ultra-modern country whose people have retained a collective outlook. A second, that a higher prevalence of infectious disease in a place makes contact with strangers more dangerous, and causes groups to turn inward, is hardly better. Europe has had its share of plagues; probably more that either Japan or Korea.
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Are We Overreacting to Cyberbullies?
Research suggests that there is likely a high degree of overlap between traditional forms of bullying and bullying online.
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Get It Over With: People Choose More Difficult Tasks to Get Jobs Done More Quickly
Most of us are well-acquainted with procrastination, but new research suggests that “pre-crastination”—hurrying to complete a task as soon as possible—may also be a common phenomenon.
