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Get Off the Work Treadmill
Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, likens today’s work environment to running on a treadmill. People race to keep up with meetings, emails, and deadlines, while making no real progress – especially on creative tasks. Instead, it often would be better to do less, says Amabile, an APS Fellow. The single most important thing managers can do to enhance workplace creativity is “protecting at least 30 to 60 minutes each day for yourself and your people that’s devoted to quiet reflection,” she tells the Harvard Gazette. Amabile has spent the last 35 years researching life inside organizations and how it influences employees and their performance.
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Fear of Holes May Stem From Evolutionary Survival Response
For those with trypophobia, the sight of clusters of holes in various formations can cause intensely unpleasant visceral reactions.
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Consolidated Standards for Reporting Trials (CONSORT)
Get involved in the development of a new reporting guideline for social and psychological interventions! An international initiative of researchers, journal editors, and stakeholders in intervention studies is working with the Consolidated Standards for Reporting Trials (CONSORT) Group to develop CONSORT-SPI: an official Extension for Social and Psychological Interventions. We are currently looking for participants for an upcoming Delphi process (starting mid-September 2013) to generate possible reporting standards for the guideline. Stakeholders involved in researching, publishing, funding, commissioning, or providing these interventions are invited to contact us to participate.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Relative Trustworthiness of Inferential Tests of the Indirect Effect in Statistical Mediation Analysis: Does Method Really Matter? Andrew F. Hayes and Michael Scharkow Mediation analysis is commonly used to examine the indirect effect of one variable (X) on a second variable (Y) through a mediator variable (M). Although many researchers conduct mediation analysis, not all do so in the same way. The authors examined the delta method, percentile and bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals (CIs), the distribution-of-the-product approach, the Monte Carlo CI, and the test of joint significance.
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Your Spouse’s Voice Is Easier to Hear – And Easier to Ignore
With so many other competing voices, having a conversation on a bustling subway or at a crowded cocktail party takes a great deal of concentration. New research suggests that the familiar voice of a spouse stands out against other voices, helping to sharpen auditory perception and making it easier to focus on one voice at a time. “Familiar voices appear to influence the way an auditory 'scene' is perceptually organized,” explains lead researcher Ingrid Johnsrude of Queen’s University, Canada. Johnsrude and her colleagues asked married couples, ages 44-79, to record themselves reading scripted instructions out loud.
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Science Reveals the Benefits of an Aging Workforce
The over-65 set is not only increasing in numbers (by 2030 the percentage of people age 65 and older is expected to increase from almost 13 percent to almost 20 percent, according to data from the Stanford Center on Longevity). They are also healthier and more active than in previous generations. That means many of them will be working longer than a generation ago. Does their increasing presence in the workplace predict an increase or decrease in ageism? Psychological researchers are stepping up research on bias against older adults as part of an effort to break stereotypes on aging and curb age discrimination.