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In This Issue |
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1.Skills are envied
more than beauty
2.Negativity leads to early death
3.Problem-Solving can
become a problem
4.Why it is difficult to resist tempation
5.'Handsfree' is not 'Mindfree'
6.'Terrible Ten' rude
behaviour
7.The stress of Email
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Skills are envied more than beauty
Forget beauty or
money – the real thing we envy in others is their
skills, according to a new ICM poll, commissioned by the
Learning and Skills Council. “Skills are fundamental to
our future as individuals and as a nation,” feels John
Denham, Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities
and Skills.
90 percent of the
respondents, who participated in the poll, believed that
they have the ability to control their future using
current skills or by learning new ones. 20 percent of
the respondents wanted to become an entrepreneur, 14
percent wanted to become a doctor or a nurse and 10
percent wanted to become a teacher. Just 2 percent
wanted to become a model and only 1 percent wanted to
become a reality TV star.
“It is great to see
that people are realizing that fame is not all, it is
cracked up to be. We value real skills and
entrepreneurship over instant celebrity,” stated Chris
Banks, Chairman of the Learning Skills Council.
“Investing time
and efforts in new skills is a great way to build self
confidence. So it’s very interesting to see that people
are making this association and recognizing that skills
will help them develop the feeling that they are in
control of their lives,” explained Dr.Raj Persaud,
Consultant Psychiatrist at the
Maudsley
Hospital.
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Negativity leads to early death
 Psychologists
agree that the big five personality traits are
Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness,
Emotional stability and Openness to experience. When we
think of someone as steady or gloomy, what we are really
doing is unconsciously taking a measure of these five
traits and crunching them together.
A number of
studies show that people with a heavy dose of
neuroticism (the tendency toward negative thinking and
opposite of emotional stability) do not handle stress
well and subject themselves to increased mortality.
Daniel Mroczek, a
psychologist at
Purdue
University,
wanted to explore whether this inherited trait is a
death sentence or people with this propensity toward
negativity, can change their destiny.
Mroczek tracked
more than 1600 men over 12 years, recording not only how
neurotic they were at the start but also whether they
got more neurotic or less neurotic over time. He looked
at the mortality risk for these men over an 18-year
span.
Mroczek found
that men who got more and more stressed, worried and
fretful increased their risk of dying, mostly from
cancer and heart disease. This downward spiral of
increased neuroticism gave them a ticket to an early
grave.
Mroczek also
found that men with a fretful temperament, if they
managed to calm down over time, had survival rates
similar to those of emotionally stable men. That’s good
news and incentive to develop emotional stability.
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Problem-solving can become a problem
 Anita
Tucker, a doctoral student at
Harvard
Business
School
observed hospital nurses for 239 hours, watching them
solving problems.
When there was a
shortage of linen due to an ill-timed delivery, they
borrowed linen from the next unit. When the medication
instruction was not clear, they managed to track down
the physician and get it cleared. When the security tags
fell off the newborns’ ankles, they combed the entire
nursery and found them.
Are such
problem-solving methods good? “Yes as well as no,” says
Anita Tucker. It is good because patients get excellent
care. It is bad because the root of the problems is
never addressed and problems become perpetual.
These problems,
however minor they may be, must be recorded, causes must
be looked into and remedial measures must be taken. For
example, ordering extra supply of linen for weekends and
ordering better quality security tags that do not come
off ensures that these problems do not recur.
Addressing the
root of the problems ensures that employees can perform
more efficiently if they don’t have to spend time on
solving these recurring problems. Identifying the source
of these minor problems and initiating action to prevent
them from happening ensures that these minor problems do
not become major problems.
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Why it is difficult to resist temptation |
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The social
problems we face today such as addictions, overeating,
breaking the law – all have one thing in common – our
inability to say no to our temptation. Why do we lack
this crucial ability to restrain our temptation?
Michael Inzlicht
of the
University
of
Toronto
and colleague Jennifer Gutsell studied what happens in
our brain, when our vices got the better of us. They
asked the participants to suppress their emotions while
watching an upsetting movie. The participants reported
their ability to suppress their feelings on a scale from
one to nine. Then they were asked to complete a Stroop
task which involves naming the colour of a printed word,
instead of saying the printed word (for example, saying
black when reading the word blue written in black
colour), another task which requires a significant
amount of self-control.
The researchers
found that those who suppressed their emotions best
while watching the upsetting movie, performed worst on
the Stroop task, indicating that they had used up their
resources for self-control. An EEG performed during the
Stroop task confirmed these results.
After engaging in
one act of self-control our brain seems to fail in the
next act, requiring self-control. This could be due to
the reason that we have limited resources to control
ourselves and all acts of self-control come from the
same source.
These results
have significant implications for those aiming at
behaviour modification. For example, a person aiming to
quit both smoking and drinking will find it easier to
achieve his goal, if he aims to quit one at a time.
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‘Hands free’ is not ‘Mind free’
The
brain can’t simultaneously give full attention to both
visual task (sight) and auditory task (sound),
according to a study by
Johns
Hopkins
University.
The reason is that directing attention to listening
effectively turns down the volume on input to the
visual parts of the brain explains Steven Yantis, a
professor in the University’s department of
psychological and brain sciences, the lead author of
the study.
In the study
conducted in a neuro imaging lab, healthy young adults
in the age group of 19 to 35 years were asked to view
a computer display while listening to voices over
headphones. They watched a rapidly changing display of
multiple letters and digits while listening to three
voices speaking letters and digits at the same time.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI),
Yantis and his team recorded the brain activity. They
found that when the subjects directed their attention
to visual tasks, the auditory parts of the brain
recorded decreased activity and vice versa.
This research
helps explain why talking on a cell phone can impair
driving performance, even when the driver is using a
hands-free device. When attention is deployed to one
modality- say the auditory task of listening to the
cell phone, it extracts a cost on another modality –
the visual task of driving.
This research
also explains why audio cassettes are more effective
than video cassettes in learning a language; why
people learn better and faster in a calm environment;
why people find it easier to recall the lyrics after
listening to an audio music album than after watching
a video music album.
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‘Terrible Ten’ rude behaviour
Research
conducted jointly by the Johns Hopkins
University and the Jacob France Institute of the
University of Baltimore found that
‘discrimination at work’ was at the top of
terrible ten rude behaviour.
The
researchers posed thirty examples of rude
behaviour to respondents, each linked to a five
point Likert scale ranging from 1 (not
offensive) to 5 (most offensive). Respondents
were asked to indicate the degree to which they
personally considered each behaviour offensive.
Categories of rude or uncivil behaviour were
derived from a survey conducted online through
yahoo.com
The list
of ‘terrible ten’ behaviours:
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Discrimination in an employment situation
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Erratic / aggressive driving that endangers
others
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Taking credit for someone else’s work
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Treating service providers as inferiors
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Joke
or remarks that mock another’s race /
gender / age / disability or religion
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Children who behave aggressively or who
bully others
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Littering (including trash, spitting, pet
waste etc.)
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Misuse of handicapped privileges
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Smoking in non-smoking places / smoking in
front of non-smokers without asking
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Using
cell phones or text messaging in
mid-conversation or during a meeting
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The stress of email
A study by the
University
of
Glasgow
found that emails interrupt work constantly and
cause stress. Employees become tired, frustrated
and unproductive as they attempt to keep up with
the messages.
“Email is
the thing that now causes us the most problems
in our working lives. You want to know what is
in there, especially if it is from a family
member or friends or your boss. So you break off
what you are doing to read the email,” says Dr.
Karen Renaud, author of the study.
The
problem is that when you go back to what you
were doing, you have lost your chain of thought
and of course you are less productive. People’s
brains get tired from breaking off from
something every few minutes to check emails.
The study
found that 34 percent of the employees felt
stressed by the sheer number of emails and
obligation to respond quickly and a further 28
percent saw them as a source of pressure.
Half of
the respondents said they checked emails more
than once an hour and 35 percent said they
checked emails every 15 minutes. Respondents
generally felt that they had to respond more
quickly to emails to meet the expectations of
senders. Females in particular tended to feel
more pressure to respond than males.
Recipients should not constantly monitor their
emails since this will negatively affect all
other work activities and should instead set
aside dedicated email reading times, is the
recommendation from Judith Ramsay, a
psychologist and Mario Hair, a statistician,
co-authors of the study.
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