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Watching funny cat videos at work can boost your productivity according to study
TODAY: Feeling guilty about watching cat videos at work? Don't be. Science is here to tell you it's OK. A recent study has found that being exposed to something funny while on the job can actually make you more productive. So feel free to boost your work output by watching this cat chase a duck while riding a Roomba in a shark costume. ... The study was conducted by psychological scientists David Cheng and Lu Wang of the University of New South Wales, who found that taking a humor break can help productivity. They gave students a boring task of crossing out the letter "e" in two pages of text, with one group assigned to watch a video from British comedy "Mr.
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Probing The Complexities Of Transgender Mental Health
NPR: Experiencing the world as a different gender than the one assigned to you at birth can take a toll. Nearly all research into transgender individuals' mental health shows poorer outcomes. A study looking specifically at transgender women, predominantly women of color, only further confirms that reality. What's less clear, however, is whether trans individuals experience more mental distress due to external factors, such as discrimination and lack of support, or internal factors, such as gender dysphoria, the tension resulting from having a gender identity that differs from the one assigned at birth. ...
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The Link Between Income Inequality and Physical Pain
Harvard Business Review: The United States is in a pain crisis. The use of pain killers increased by 50% from 2006 to 2012 and one recent estimate put the cost of physical pain on the U.S. economy at $635 billion — a 1,000% increase from 20 years earlier. At the same time, a widening income gap, growing sense of financial desperation, and erosion of the middle class have elevated economic insecurity to the top of the political agenda in the United States. A growing body of evidence suggests that this fiscal pain and physical pain are linked and reinforce each other.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: I Think, Therefore Eyeblink: The Importance of Contingency Awareness in Conditioning Gabrielle Weidemann, Michelle Satkunarajah, and Peter F. Lovibond Associative learning in humans is thought to be able to occur both unconsciously and consciously; however, studies of this dual-system for learning have produced conflicting results. Participants performed a conditioning task in which one of several stimuli was paired with a puff of air. Researchers manipulated how much information they gave participants about the pairing, giving them no information, some information, or detailed information.
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Why Your Office Isn’t Doing You Any Favors
The business world is not known for being warm and fuzzy, but new research demonstrates that the workplace really can stifle generous behavior. “In five studies, using both attitudinal and behavioral measures, we consistently found that people primed to think of themselves in an organizational context (e.g., co-worker) felt less motivated to reciprocate, and did reciprocate than those in an otherwise parallel personal (e.g., friend or acquaintance) situation,” writes Stanford University researchers Peter Belmi and Jeffrey Pfeffer. Previous research has shown that reciprocation is a strong, and often automatic, social norm.
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Studies Suggest Multilingual Exposure Boosts Children’s Communication Skills
NPR: NPR's Robert Siegel talks with Katherine Kinzler, associate professor of psychology and human development at Cornell University, about her research into the social skills developed by children raised in multilingual environments versus monolingual environments. Read the whole story: NPR
