“Stories shape our lives and in some cases help define a person,” according Emory University’s Gregory S. Berns, who with Kristina Blaine, Michael J. Prietula,and Brandon E. Pye used laboratory imaging to investigate the impact of reading fiction.
The team conducted resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scan (fMRI) of 21 volunteers on 19 consecutive days.
Robert Harris
The first five daily scans provided a baseline, then participants read 1/9th (about 30 pages) of Robert Harris’s Pompeii, a 2003 thriller, during the evening of the next 9 days.
For the next 9 mornings, they completed a quiz on the novel’s content, then resting-state (non-reading) fMRI.
Kristina Blaine
The brain scans showed significant connectivity increases in the left angular/supramarginal gyri in the left temporal cortex and right posterior temporal gyri, areas associated with perspective taking and story comprehension.
Michael Prietula
The last 5 daily scans occurred with no reading the previous evening, and showed persistent connectivity changes for up to five days in bilateral somatosensory cortex in the central sulcus, suggesting neural mechanisms for:
Olaf Hauk
-“Embodiedsemantics,” described by University of Cambridge’s Olaf Hauk and Nadja Tschentscher, as well as University of Southern California’s Lisa Aziz-Zadeh and Antonio Damasio
–Muscle memory, investigated by Amirkabir University of Technology’s Hossein Hassanpoor and Ali Fallah with Mohsin Raza of Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences.
Brandon Pye
This somatosensory activation suggests that reading a novel activates neural changes found with physical sensation and movement systems.
Berns noted that “…good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense …(and)… may also be happening biologically.”
These fMRI findings reinforce findings that reading award-winning fiction can increase empathic awareness of others and related interpersonal insight.
-*What non-fiction reading provided memorable empathic insights about others?
This last “side effect” they noted was “promoting brand preference,” in a study by Radboud University Nijmegen’s Madelijn Strick, Rob Holland, Rick van Baaren, and Ad van Knippenberg, who investigated “how humor breaks resistance to influence.”
Team Hasan compared more than 350 adults from Aurangabad, India, with the same number of adults from Mississauga, Canada on demographics, typical amount of laughter, lifestyle, subjective well-being, life satisfaction, emotional well-being, and health dimensions.
Ad van Knippenberg
In India, moderate levels of laughter were linked to greatest well-being and life satisfaction, with low levels and high levels showing no effect.
Canadians also greatest benefits associated with moderate laughter, but higher levels of laughter were associated with negative effects.
The Hasan and Hasan team attributed this result to Canada’s higher prevalence of bronchial asthma, which may be precipitated or exacerbated by extreme laughter.
These research findings suggest that more laughter is “not always better” and may require “titrated doses” to extract benefits while minimizing documented “risks.”
-*How do you capitalize on laughter’s benefits while minimizing “the risks”?
People with greater emotional intelligence can separate unpleasant thoughts and feelings from decision making and are less likely to show the affect heuristic bias in risky decisions.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud considered this ability to separate unpleasant thoughts and feelings as a defense mechanism deployed unconsciously to reduce anxiety and preserve self-esteem.
He called this experience “isolation,” contrasted with “compartmentalization,” which he defined as separating unpleasant emotions from each other.
Roy Baumeister
Florida State’s Roy F. Baumeister, with Karen Dale then of Case Western, and Baruch College’s Kristin L. Sommer, documented recent studies that demonstrate “isolation” as a defense mechanism or coping strategy to contain negative feelings, “emotional contagion,” and “spillover.”
John Mayer
Yip and Côté demonstrated the relationship among emotional intelligence, evoked anxiety and propensity to make riskier choices in their lab studies of more than 100 volunteers, who completed the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Testdeveloped by Yale’sPeter Salovey and David R. Caruso with John D. Mayer of University of New Hampshire.
David R Caruso
One group received an anxiety-provoking assignment: One minute to prepare a videotaped speech shown to peers studying “academic and social standing” at the university.
The other group was given a less stressful assignment: Prepare a grocery list.
Volunteers in both groups could choose their compensation for participating in the study: Receive $1, or take a one in 10 chance to receive $10.
Melissa Finucane
For those given the stressful speech-writing task, people who scored higher on emotional intelligence chose the riskier option to receive $10 three times as often as those who scored lower on emotional intelligence.
In contrast, volunteers who completed the low-stress task made similar choices for compensation no matter the level of emotional intelligence.
Ellen Peters
However, people can learn emotional awareness skills to enable mental focus and contain unrelated incidental emotions, according to related studies by Yip and Côté.
They demonstrated this ability to contain anxiety when some volunteers in the speech-writing task were told they “might feel worried” because making a speech is an anxiety-producing task.
Other speech-creators received no further instructions.
Kristin Sommer
Yip and Côté “primed” no emotion among some grocery list-creators by saying that they “may feel no emotion” or no instructions.
Participants were then primed to separate their emotions from their decision-making by being told that their emotions were irrelevant to their decisions.
Volunteers read information about the benefits of receiving flu injections and consequences of no inoculation during flu season.
Then participants were given the option to register for nearby flu injection clinic.
The reminder that emotions were irrelevant to decisions changed previous results, by increasing the frequency that participants with lower emotional awareness chose the riskier option of not attending the flu injection clinic.
The findings suggest that adults can reduce emotional bias in decision-making by explicitly identifying emotions and separating them from critical thinking processes
Questions that enable people to separate emotions, thoughts, and decisions include:
How do I feel right now?
What is causing me to feel that way?
And are my feelings relevant to the decision I need to make?
-*How do you avoid the affect heuristic when making decisions?
Mueller and team pointed out a paradox: Most managers say they want innovative solutions to workplace issues from team members, yet often reject these creative ideas to reduce risk and uncertainty.
The team asked volunteers to rate a running shoe equipped with nanotechnology that improved fit and reduced potential to develop blisters.
Jack Goncalo
They “primed” some participants toward increaseduncertainty in this task by telling them that there were many potential answers to a problem.
In contrast, they cued another group with reduced uncertainty by instructing them that a problem required a single solution.
When volunteers who said they favored creative ideas experienced uncertainty, they preferred concepts of practicality on an implicit word association test, and associated “creativity” with negative concepts including “vomit,” “poison” and “agony.”
Uncertain participants also rated the shoe as significantly lesscreative than those in the more structured condition, suggesting that were less able to recognize a creative idea and held an unconscious “negative bias against creativity.”
Cheryl Wakslak
In more recent work, Mueller collaborated with University of Southern California’s Cheryl Wakslak and Viswanathan Krishnan with University of California, San Diego to expand the idea assessment scenario with two ideas that were independently rated as “creative,” and two ideas judged “not creative.”
Vish Krishnan
Mueller, Wakslak and Krishnan cued some participants to consider “why” in evaluating creative ideas, to evoke broad, abstract thinking, and “high-level construal.“
They instructed other volunteers to think about “how” creative idea works, to stimulate narrow focus on practical details and logistics, and “low-level construal.”
Although participants in both groups rated two non-creative ideas similarly, those who adopted a “high-level construal” or a “why” mindset recognized creative ideas more often than those using the “how” mindset.
To mitigate the paradoxical rejection of creative ideas, organizational leaders can ask team members to consider “why” when creative evaluating proposals to enable “big picture” thinking and a broader construal level.
-*How do you encourage innovative solutions to work challenges?
People differ in their circadian rhythms, which determine times of greatest mental alertness, reflected in body temperature differences.
James A Horne
“Morningness” describes people who awaken easily and are most alert early in the morning, whereas “eveningness” refers to “night owls” who awaken later and feel most alert late in the day, according to Loughborough University’s James A. Horne and colleague O. Östberg, who developed a self-report questionnaire to distinguish these these temporal preferences.
During non-optimal times, people may be more distractible, less focused and more able to consider diverse information, alternatives, and interpretations. These conditions can enable innovative thinking and creativity.
William Hrushesky
William Hrushesky, formerly of University of South Carolina, argued that “timing is everything” in medical treatment, and Wieth and Zacks’ findings suggest suggests that working at “off-peak” times is effective for tasks that require creative thinking rather than analytic rigor.
-*How do you sequence your work tasks to enhance performance during “non-optimal” and “peak” times of day?
University of Cambridge’s Peter Jason Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling uncovered four music-preference dimensions when they analyzed music preferences of more than 3,500 individuals in six studies:
Reflective and Complex
Intense and Rebellious
Upbeat and Conventional
Energetic and Rhythmic
These music-preference categories were related to cognitive abilities like verbal IQ and attitudes like political orientation in addition to Big Five personality dimensions.
In other studies, Rentfrow and Gosling found that musical preference accurately predicted Big Five personality traits including “Openness to Experience”, Extraversion, and Emotional Stability among strangers when they asked same-sex and opposite-sex volunteers with an average age of 18 to “get to know each other” over 6 weeks.
This study related “sensation seeking” to musical preferences and confirmed speculation that people who seek greater levels of environmental stimulation through auditory, visual, gustatory, and other experiences tend to like complex, intense music.
These generalizations may change as people age, so Nazarene University College’s Kelley Schwartz and Gregory Fouts of University of Calgary examined 164 adolescents’ music preferences in relation to personality dimensions and developmental issues.
Taken together, these findings on personality trends related to musical preferences among adolescents and adults suggest that when people master specific developmental issues, music relevant to those challenges may no longer be appealing, and preferences may change.
-*To what extent do you prefer music that “regulates” your mood and productivity?
-*How accurately can you infer people’s personality traits from their musical preferences?
Emotions elicited by music influence can influence and even bias visual judgments, according to University of London’s Nidhya Logeswaran and Joydeep Bhattacharya.
They presented volunteers with short excerpts of “happy” music or “sad” music, then showed neutral, “happy,” and “sad” faces. When people listened to a “happy” music, they were more likely to perceive faces as “happy” even when the face was neutral.
Similarly, the “priming” with “sad” music was associated with more ratings of faces as “sad,” even if they were neutral.
The team also observed the effects of musical “priming” in electrophysiological measures of brain potential components within 100 milliseconds after the faces were presented, suggesting rapid neuronal information processing.
Even if listeners’ perceptions and judgments can be biased by emotional music, listeners do not experience the precise emotions they hear in music.
“Muzak” (now Mood Media) audio in workplaces can evoke emotional responses that may lead to biased business decisions.
As long ago as the 1950s, concerned American citizens claimed that Muzak practiced “brainwashing” with its planned musical sequences in quarter-hour segments.
Muzak’s playlist is synchronized to time of day to “increase energy” at predicted low-energy times based on its patented “Stimulus Progression.”
These 15-minute sequences feature about six songs with varying “stimuli values,” based on tempo, rhythm, instrumentation and orchestra size.
The next 15-minute period features silence.
Over a 24-hour period, tunes with higher “stimulus value” are played when people are typically “lethargic” – 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., and slower songs are played “after lunch” and at the end of the work day.
Muzak claimed that this programming “increases morale and productivity at workplaces, increase sales at supermarkets, and even dissuade potential shoplifting at department stores.”
The emotional tone of music may bias other cross-sensory judgments. Adrian C. North, working atUniversity of Leicester and Herriott Watt University, tested the effect of music in a supermarket on wine selections and olfactory/gustatory judgments wine’s properties.
North ensured that French accordian music or German Bierkeller brass band music were played on alternating days for two weeks at the supermarket.
French wines and German wines had similar prices and their order on the shelf was changed each day.
After 82 shoppers selected wines, an interviewer asked customers to complete a questionnaire about the purchase, including:
Preference for French or German wines
Extent to which the music brought to mind France or Germany
Degree to which the music influenced specific wine selection.
The results from 44 shoppers suggest that music influenced shoppers’ wine selections:More French wine was sold when French music played (40 bottles of French wine vs 8 bottles of German wine), and more German wine was sold when German music played (22 bottles of German wine vs 12 bottles of French wine).
North concluded that barely audible music can implicitly, unconsciously affect thoughts, perceptions, decisions, and even buying action.
They pointed to the public health and social implications of their findings when they asserted that “motivational synchronous music may serve as an important tool to underpin current initiatives of Western governments to improve public health and lessen the financial burdens on public health services.”
Considerable research indicates that training in music theory and performance is associated with better performance on quantitative, reasoning, visual, and motor tasks, but recent findings offer a counterpoint.
Leonid Perlovsky
Among the evidence supporting the benefits of musical training, De Rochebelle School (C.S.D.D)’s Arnaud Cabanac collaborated with Leonid Perlovsky of Harvard University, Canadian Air Force Research Laboratory’s Marie-Claude Bonniot-Cabanac, and Michel Cabanac of Laval University to report that student musicians earned better grades than peers and performed better on a more stressful, complicated tasks.
They examined data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and found that adolescents with music training have better cognitive skills and school grades and were 15 percent more likely to report planning to attend a university.
In addition, these young musicians were more conscientious, open and ambitious across socio-economic statuses.
These improvements in cognitive and non-cognitive skills were more than twice as great as the contribution of sports, theater or dance training and participation.
Sylvain Moreno
Preschool children, too, demonstrated enhanced performance on a measure of verbal intelligence after participating in an interactive computerized music training, according to Rotman Research Institute’s Sylvain Morenowith University of Toronto colleagues E. Glenn SchellenbergandTom Chau, whocollaborated withYork University’s Ellen Bialystok, Raluca Barac, andNicholas J. Cepeda.
Children who received at least three years of instrumental music training outperformed their control counterparts on auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills, vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills in studies by University of Pennsylvania’s Marie Forgeard, with AndreaNorton, and Gottfried Schlaug ofHarvard Medical School’s and Boston College’s Ellen Winner.
These performance enhancements were associated with duration of musical training, but Forgeard’s team did not replicate earlier findings of enhanced spatial skills, phonemic awareness, and mathematical abilities.
With Harvard colleagues Adena Schachner, Rachel C. Katz, and Elizabeth S. Spelke, Mehr conducted two Randomized Control Trials (RCT) with four year old preschool children to evaluate the cognitive effects of music classes, compared with non-musical visual arts instruction or to a no instruction.
After six weeks, the team evaluated children’s skills in:
Spatial-navigational reasoning
Visual form analysis
Numerical discrimination
Receptive vocabulary.
Adena Schachner
Although their initial findings suggested improved performance for children who received musical training, the team was unable to replicate the finding.
The team found a small positive effect of music instruction on intelligence in only one study.
They reported that children who participated in music classes performed no better than those with visual arts or no classes on any assessment.
Elizabeth Spelke
Mehr and team concluded that before asserting cognitive benefits of music training, it is essential to:
Conduct Randomized Control Trials, since only one previous RCT showed a small positive effect
-*Did New Year’s Resolutions fade as quickly as the month of January?
Katherine Milkman
If so, University of Pennsylvania Katherine Milkman has a recommendation to resume the good intentions toward goals: “Nudges”—small environmental interventions that can shift behavior to increase adherence to challenging commitments, whether at work or in personal life.
Hengchen Dai
Milkman collaborated with Wharton colleague Hengchen Dai and Harvard’s Jason Riis to investigate “temporal turning points” – moments that feel like a new beginning, like New Year’s Day or beginning a new job or school.
Jason Riis
Milkman, Riis, and Dai reported several examples of the “fresh start effect”: They found that the number of online Google searches for the term “diet” increase following temporal landmarks like the beginning of a new week, month, year, or semester; a birthday or a holiday.
The largest increase—82% above the baseline—occurred immediately after New Year’s Day for nine years they studied.
Similarly, the number of gym visits of 12,000 undergraduates over 18 months increased in January, then declined, with smaller increases at the beginning of each week, each month, and each term.
This pattern also occurred among 43,000 participants in a goal-setting website, stickK, over 30 months.
Members can set goals and contractually agree to consequences for failing to attain them, such as community sanctions to monetary payments to disliked organizations.
The greatest number of contracts—145% above the average rate—were signed at the beginning of the New Year, and more contracts were signed at the beginning of each week.
Richard Thaler
Commitments to pursue and return to goals increase after these “notational boundary,” described by Richard Thaler of University of Chicago.
A temporally-triggered “fresh start” can compensate for limited willpower and persistence by giving people a chance to restart their commitments.
Besides “temporal turning points,” self-designed “nudges” can be contingency plans for a specific corrective action when confronted with the temptation to deviate from the goal path: “Whenever situation x arises, I will initiate the goal-directed response y.”
Peter Gollwitzer
New York University’s Peter Gollwitzer calls these mitigation plans “implementation intentions,” which result in better adherence to goal-directed efforts when developed before tempting situational cues.
Stephen Ciccone
The stock market’s “January Effect” of better-than-average performance early in the year may result from the “fresh start” phenomenon, although Stephen J. Ciccone of University of New Hampshire argues that it may be more affected by investor optimism and the “false hope syndrome.”
Janet Polivy
University of Toronto’s Janet Polivy and C.Peter Hermandescribe the “false hope syndrome’s” unrealistic expectations about the likely speed, amount, ease, and consequences of self-change attempts, and subsequent disappointment of these optimistic aspirations.
Ciccone found that investor sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Confidence, peaks in January and suggested that optimistic bid up stock prices of firms with higher levels of uncertainty.
C. Peter Herman
Typically, these firms are unable to meet the optimistic expectations, and disappoint investors when they under-perform.
However, this pattern continues each year, probably due to the combined impact of “fresh start effect” and the “false hope syndrome.”
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett of Clark University found that both 200 adolescents and more than 200 adults held optimistic biases regarding the risks of smoking even though the strong majorities of smokers and nonsmokers in these groups agreed that smoking is addictive and causes death for “most people” who smoke.
However, the adolescent and adult smokers doubted that they would die from smoking even if they smoked for 30 or 40 years, and most adolescents believed that they “could smoke for a few years and then quit.”
Roger Buehler
Likewise, most people underestimate time required to complete tasks, called “planning fallacy” by Wilfred Laurier University’s Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin of University British Columbia and University of Waterloo’s Michael Ross.
Dale Griffin
They found that 465 volunteers:
Underestimated their own but not others’ completion times for academic and nonacademic tasks
Focused on future plans rather than comparing with similar past experiences when making completions time estimates
Attributed their past errors in predicting completion times to external, transient, and specific factors, implying less personal accountability for misjudgments.
Mike Ross
Volunteers were able to eliminate their bias toward inaccurately optimistic estimates when they explicitly considered connect relevant past experiences to inform current estimates.
They compared 119 volunteers’ expectations about their participation in a twelve-week-long exercise course and their actual attendance, and found that participants who set smaller goals were more likely to achieve and maintain the goal behavior over time.
-*How effective are “temporal turning points” to initiate and re-start positive behaviors toward your goals? -*How do you guard against optimism bias and “false hope syndrome” in planning and executing toward your goals?
Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary 