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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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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
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Most people aren’t resilient to life’s hardships, researchers find
Quartz: Previous research has found that, when faced with a negative life event, most people fare well when left well alone. Studies found that, after divorce, unemployment, or the death of a spouse, the majority of people proved resilient, maintaining stable high life satisfaction scores before and after each event. But these findings have been questioned in a paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science this month. ... Co-author Frank Infurna told Science Daily that it shows it can be far better to intervene and help people cope with negative life events.
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Watching Cat Videos at Work Could Make You More Productive
TIME: Go ahead and watch that supercut of cats freaking out when they see a cucumber one more time: Scientists say it could make you more productive at work. In a paper for the Journal of Business and Psychology, an Australian study found that when experiment subjects were given a boring job to do, then exposed to something funny, they worked twice as long as subjects who watched videos about nature or business management. Read the whole story: TIME
