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How helping others can put more hours into your day by making you feel like you have more spare time
Daily Mail: If you're always feeling there aren't enough hours in the day, the answer could be to do a favour for someone else, say scientists. Despite the fact it involves giving up some of that precious time, devoting a few hours or even just minutes to others can make us feel as if we actually have more free time, a study claims. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania compared the effects of 'chillaxing', or wasting time, and giving time – for example, writing a letter to a sick child. They found that those who did the latter felt they had more time on their hands, reports the journal Psychological Science.
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When We Forget to Remember – Failures in Prospective Memory Range From Annoying to Lethal
A surgical team closes an abdominal incision, successfully completing a difficult operation. Weeks later, the patient comes into the ER complaining of abdominal pain and an X-ray reveals that one of the forceps used in the operation was left inside the patient. Why would highly skilled professionals forget to perform a simple task they have executed without difficulty thousands of times before? These kinds of oversights occur in professions as diverse as aviation and computer programming, but research from psychological science reveals that these lapses may not reflect carelessness or lack of skill but failures of prospective memory.
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Grin and Bear It! Smiling Facilitates Stress Recovery
Just grin and bear it! At some point, we have all probably heard or thought something like this when facing a tough situation. But is there any truth to this piece of advice? Feeling good usually makes us smile, but does it work the other way around? Can smiling actually make us feel better? In a study forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman of the University of Kansas investigate the potential benefits of smiling by looking at how different types of smiling, and the awareness of smiling, affects individuals’ ability to recover from episodes of stress.
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Awe Slows Down Time, Boosts Life Satisfaction: Study
Huffington Post: Think back to your last jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring moment -- was it gazing across vast stretches of ocean, or into the deep voids of a canyon? A new study in the journal Psychological Science shows that those feelings of awe seem to slow down time and boost feelings of life satisfaction. "...Awe offset the feeling that time is limited, which increased willingness to volunteer time, accentuated preferences for experiential goods, and lifted satisfaction with life," the researchers, from Stanford University and the University of Minnesota, wrote in the study. The study included three experiments.
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Mind games of the victorious
Chicago Tribune: For decades after the first sports psychology lab was established in 1920 in Germany, mental coaches have been the water boys of sports science, viewed by their colleagues as not quite good enough to make the first-string team. That has changed. Virtually every top professional team and elite athlete has a psychologist on speed dial for help conquering the yips - when stress makes crucial muscles jerk and ruins, say, an archery shot - marshal the power of visualization, or just muster the confidence that can mean the difference between medaling or just muddling through.
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Your mean boss could be insecure
The Washington Post: Most people who work inside organizations know the experience of having their ideas shot down as soon as they’re floated. And for some folks, it’s a daily barrage. In their book, The Knowing-Doing Gap, Jeff Pfeffer and Bob Sutton point to negativity as a primary reason companies fail to implement improvements, even when key people inside those companies know exactly what should be done and how to do it. And this negativity seems to be taking a growing toll on workers. Recent Gallup research shows that 17 percent of people who quit their jobs leave because they can’t stand management or the work environment.
