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Happiness Can Boost Employee Productivity by 10 Percent
Slate: It’s natural to believe that success will bring you happiness, but a variety of psychologists, including Harvard’s Shawn Achor, have argued that this common-sense understanding is actually backward. Success doesn’t make you happy so much as happiness makes you more successful. But how much more successful exactly, and how can you ever rigorously, scientifically test something like that? Quantifying Happiness A team of economists out of the University of Warwick in the U.K. and a German university recently attempted to find out. Their results are soon to be published in the Journal of Labour Economics.
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UCLA Memory Program Offers ‘Gym For Your Brain’
The Washington Post: Just as they had so many times during the past 60 years, Marianna and Albert Frankel stepped onto the dance floor. He took her hand in his, and smiling, waltzed her around the room. “I remembered how it used to be and we could really do the waltz and he would whirl me around until I got dizzy,” said Marianna Frankel, 82, who is 10 years younger than her husband. ... Memory loss can have profound impact on patients, leading to an erosion of independence, a sense of helplessness and depression. Yet in some ways, it can affect their caregivers more. It’s hard to be the only one who can remember shared times.
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Muscle Head
The New York Times: “Feel the burn!” That was Jane Fonda in 1982, exhorting the viewers of her first-of-its-kind workout video to engage in an exotic pursuit called exercise. In her striped leotard and legwarmers, Fonda led the charge against the generally held opinion that exercise was a weird waste of time. (In those days, lifting weights was for Charles Atlas aspirants, and jogging was for quirky “health nuts.”) The tireless exertions of Fonda — and of tiny-shorted Richard Simmons and toothy Judi Sheppard Missett, the founder of Jazzercise — were ultimately wildly successful, making what was then an eccentric choice into what is now practically an obligation.
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At Airports, a Misplaced Faith in Body Language
The New York Times: Like the rest of us, airport security screeners like to think they can read body language. The Transportation Security Administration has spent some $1 billion training thousands of “behavior detection officers” to look for facial expressions and other nonverbal clues that would identify terrorists. But critics say there’s no evidence that these efforts have stopped a single terrorist or accomplished much beyond inconveniencing tens of thousands of passengers a year. The T.S.A. seems to have fallen for a classic form of self-deception: the belief that you can read liars’ minds by watching their bodies. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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How to Succeed Professionally by Helping Others
The Atlantic: Kat Cole started helping out early. Raised by a single mother of three who held three jobs to support the family, Cole entered the workforce as soon as it was legal. At 15, she started selling clothes at a mall. At 17, she added a second job at a restaurant—first as a hostess and then as a waitress. After juggling these jobs through high school, Cole became the first person in her family to attend college. She studied engineering and planned to go to law school, but those aspirations would soon be shattered. The restaurant was Hooters, and Cole continued working there in college. When a cook quit, she volunteered to fill in.
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Success Outside the Dress Code
The Wall Street Journal: Anyone who has felt like the odd duck of the group can take heart from new research from Harvard Business School that says sticking out in distinct ways can lend you an air of presence or influence. Standing out in certain circumstances, like wearing sweats in a luxury store, also appears to boost an individual’s standing. One obvious way people signal what the researchers called “status” is through visible markers, like what they wear and what they buy. Previous research has largely examined why people buy or wear branded items. … People who tend toward the offbeat themselves show extra fondness for freethinking behavior in others.
