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Serving Your Subordinates
In his book Arthashastra, the ancient Indian scholar Chanakya wrote that “the king shall consider as good, not what pleases himself, but what pleases his subjects.” That philosophy of leadership, embraced by many ancient religions, is increasingly being adopted in the professional world as organizations adopt people-centered management practices. Servant leadership, a concept modernized in the 20th century by the writer and consultant Robert Greenleaf, involves sharing power, putting the needs of others first, and helping followers perform at their best.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Learning and Memory Consolidation Processes of Attention-Bias Modification in Anxious and Nonanxious Individuals Rany Abend, Daniel S. Pine, Nathan A. Fox, and Yair Bar-Haim Attention-bias-modification (ABM) paradigms are a type of computerized cognitive-training intervention that reduces attentional bias toward threatening stimuli. Research on ABM has tended to focus on the attentional changes produced by these programs rather than on the learning and consolidation processes that occur during training.
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Making Tasks More Difficult May Help Overrule Office Distractions
Maybe there’s a guy who likes to yak about last night’s episode of Game of Thrones, or a woman who likes to take phone calls on speaker. Whether you’re in an 80s era “cube farm” or a modern open office, working in the midst of a sea of noisy distractions can prove particularly challenging. So how can you better focus on the task at hand? You might want to make the task a little bit more difficult, according to a new study from Swedish researcher Niklas Halin and colleagues. Previous research has highlighted two distinct factors that influence distractibility: task difficulty and working memory capacity.
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Most Fitness Apps Don’t Use Proven Motivational Techniques
NPR: If you downloaded a fitness app and didn't become a workout ninja, it may be that the app lacked the scientifically tested motivational techniques that would help get you off the couch. Instead, most popular fitness apps focus more on teaching you how to do the exercise, according to researchers at Penn State University who analyzed the 200 top apps. "You need motivational support to turn that knowledge into action," says David Conroy, a kinesiology professor at Penn State who led the study, which was published Tuesday in theAmerican Journal of Preventive Medicine. And that's where most of the 200 apps examined fell flat.
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Innovation on Display at Inaugural SAS Conference
“Ideas worth spreading” were on display in Bethesda, Maryland, April 24–26. It wasn’t a TED Conference; it was the Inaugural Conference of the Society for Affective Science, a new nonprofit dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of emotions. Leaders in the study of affect delivered eight 15-minute “TED-Inspired” talks on the following topics: Beyond Stereotype Threat: Reframing the Game to Quiet the Mind Toni Schmader, University of British Columbia (Friday, 1:56) Emotional Impact APS William James Fellow Jerry Clore, University of Virginia (Friday, 27:58) Social Regulation of Human Gene Expression Steve Cole, University of California, Los Angeles (Friday, 48:56) Not Happy?
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From Our Pets to Our Plates: The Psychology of Eating Animals
We love animals, caring for some as if they were members of our families, and yet we eat animals, too. In fact, we eat a lot of meat -- data show that the average person on this planet eats about 48 kg or 106 lbs of meat per year. This duality between loving and eating animals is what researcher Steve Loughnan of the University of Melbourne and colleagues call the “meat paradox”: “Most people care about animals and do not want to see them harmed but engage in a diet that requires them to be killed and, usually, to suffer,” the researchers explain.
