Evidence-Based Stress Management – Music – Part 4 of 5

Many people intuitively turn to music when they want to regulate energy and mood.

Valorie Salimpoor

Listening to music evokes sympathetic nervous system activity, a sign of emotional arousal measured by changes in heart rate, respiration, electrodermal activity, body temperature, and blood volume pulse, according to Rotman Research Institute’s Valorie Salimpoor, McGill’s Mitchel Benovoy, Gregory Longo, Jeremy Cooperstock, and Robert Zatorre.

Mitchel Benovoy

The researchers asked twenty-six participants to select and listen to “pleasurable” music and researchers selected “neutral” music for participants based.
Pleasure ratings and emotional arousal measures were strongly related, and those who did not experience pleasure also showed no significant increases in emotional arousal.

Gregory Longo

This finding suggests that listening to preferred music can be used as a mood-enhancement and stress management approach.

Lori Gooding

Kentucky University’s Lori Gooding and Olivia Yinger validated music’s stress management benefits for surgical patients.
They found that listening to music can reduce anxiety, subjective pain, and requests sedative medication following surgery.

Olivia Yinger

Slow music expedited relaxation and reduced pain, suggesting that music tempo, rhythm and volume can contribute to reduced anxiety, improved treatment experiences, with lower medical costs in medical intensive care units.

Nick Perham

Besides managing stress, listening to background music before task performance can increase attention and memory by evoking arousal and positive mood, according to Nick Perham and Joanne Vizard, then of University of Wales Institute Cardiff.

Joann Vizard

However, listening to music during a task decreased serial recall among adult volunteers, again pointing to the value of listening to music before but not during tasks that require acute concentration.

Kristie Young

Beyond passively listening to music, performing music by singing during a complex task can decrease performance.
Monash University’s Genevieve Hughes and Kristie Young with Christina Rudin-Brown of Transport Canada found that singing while performing complex, attention-requiring task increases mental workload and distraction.

Christina Rudin-Brown

They asked participants to learn the lyrics two popular songs, then sing them while operating a simulated car during a 6.6 km urban trip with four speed zones and encountering expected and unexpected traffic events.

Volunteers who sang while “driving” scanned their visual field less often, focused on the area directly ahead (“cognitive tunnelling”), and were less aware of potential hazards during a peripheral detection task (PDT).
However, singing reduced “driving” speed and enabled volunteers to maintain position in their “lanes.”

Efforts to compensate for the increased mental workload associated with singing and listening to music appeared ineffective, suggesting that listening to music during complex tasks impairs performance.

Jim Blascovich

In contrast to performance-disrupting impact of listening to music while performing complex tasks, SUNY Buffalo’s Karen Allen with Jim Blascovich of University of California, Santa Barbara reported that surgeons worked more quickly and accurately when they listened to preferred music, and physical stress was reduced, indicated by cardiac and electrodermal autonomic responses, hemodynamic measures.
Those who listened to no music did not perform as quickly and accurately as those who listened to their preferred music.

Stress-reducing and performance impacts of music appear related to both personal musical preferences, and musical temp and genre.

Leigh Riby

Northumbria University’s Leigh Riby found that “uplifting” music can boost mental alertness , attention and memory.

Volunteers pressed a keyboard space bar when a green square appeared on screen but not when they saw different-colored circles and squares under two conditions: in silence and while listening “uplifting” concertos (Vivaldi’s Four Seasons).

Riby measured brain activity with an EEG and found that participants responded accurately more quickly when listening to the ”uplifting” Spring concerto in contrast to performing with no music or the slower, more somber Autumn concerto.
The Spring concert “seemed to give rise to particular imagery in the brain and evoke positive, contented feelings which translated into higher levels of cognitive functioning,” according to Riby.

The underlying mechanism of music’s effects on attention, concentration, and performance is dopamine release in response to music that elicited “chills” or ‘‘musical frisson” — changes in skin conductance, heart rate, breathing, and temperature that were correlated with pleasurability ratings of the music.

Alain Dagher

Salimpoor and her McGill team, including Kevin Larcher and Alain Dagher, used PET and fMRI brain imaging techniques to measure anticipation and consumption of music as a reward, and demonstrated that volunteers who listen to preferred, “pleasurable” music experience greater release of dopamine, which is associated with emotional arousal and pleasurability ratings.

This is one of the first demonstrations that an abstract, cognitive, non-tangible reward can lead to dopamine release, and that different brain circuits are involved in anticipating (caudate) and experiencing (nucleus accumbens) musical tension and resolution.

Teresa Lesiuk

University of Miami’s Teresa Lesiuk reported improved task speed, performance, and new ideas with information technology specialists who listened to preferred music.

She attributed these positive effects to reduced stress and improved mood, and found that people who were moderately skilled at their jobs benefited most, but experts experience no benefit.
Consistent with findings that music can be a distraction in cognitively-demanding tasks, novices found that music undermined performance.

Amit Sood

When people’s minds wander, music can help focus on the present moment, according to Amit Sood of Mayo Clinic, who advocates music’s value in developing and reinforcing Mindful Attention – another approach to managing stress.

-*When does music in the workplace reduce stress? Increase performance?

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Evidence-Based Stress Management – Social Support – Part 3 of 5

Evidence-Based Stress Management – Mindful Attention – Part 2 of 5

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Workplace stress reduces employees’ ability to concentrate and pay attention to work, but mindfulness training can enhance these skills while reducing stress.

Matthew Killingsworth

Inattentiveness and distraction are both frequent and unpleasant, according to Harvard’s Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert.
They surveyed more than 2,000 adults, who reported that 47 percent of the time, their focus was not on their current activities.
In addition, these volunteers reported being less happy when distracted.

Lee Ann Cardaciotto

Another way to measure distraction and attentiveness is The Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale, developed by La Salle University’s Lee Ann Cardaciotto and James Herbert, Evan Forman, Ethan Moitra, and Victoria Farrow of Drexel University.
This tool provides a baseline measure of potential need for stress management and mindfulness training, and can demonstrate impact of training.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Current approaches to stress management training are typically based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which trains participants to focus on breathing, which slows respiration and heart rate, and triggers the “relaxation response.”

Wendy Hasenkamp

Using these frameworks, Emory’s Wendy Hasenkamp, Christine Wilson-Mendenhall, Erica Duncan, and Lawrence Barsalou investigated the neurological activity during distraction and mind-wandering experiences using fMRI scans of 14 meditators.

Participants focused on breathing and pressed a button when they realized their minds were wandering, then returned focus to the breathing.
Scans pinpointed active brain regions before, during, or after the button press.

Erica Duncan

Hasenkamp and team proposed four intervals in a cognitive cycle, based on button-pressing patterns:

Mind wandering (default mode activity), controlled by the medial prefrontal cortex, leading to self-focused thoughts
Awareness of mind wandering (attentional subnetworks)
Shifting of attention (executive subnetworks)
Sustained attention (executive subnetworks).

Lawrence Barsalou

These experienced meditators disengaged attention and deactivated medial prefrontal cortex more quickly after identifying mind-wandering, suggesting that their mindfulness practice helped them voluntarily shift from perseverative, ruminating thoughts.
They demonstrated increased connectivity between default mode and attention brain regions, enabling less default mode activity while meditating.

Britta Hölzel

Besides reducing stress, mindfulness meditation trains attention, improves working memory, fluid intelligence, introspection, and standardized test scores, according to Britta Hölzel team at Harvard and Justus Liebig Universität Giessen.
In addition, mindfulness meditation has shown beneficial results in comprehensive treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and sexual dysfunction.

Fadel Zeidan

Hölzel’s group conducted anatomical magnetic resonance (MR) images for 16 volunteers with no previous mindfulness meditation experience before and after they participated in the 8-week training program.
Gray matter concentration increased in the meditators’ left hippocampus, posterior cingulate cortex, temporo-parietal junction, and cerebellum, areas responsible for learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective taking.

Further support for mindfulness meditation’s value in reducing perceived stress and anxiety comes from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s Fadel Zeidan.
His study identified brain areas activated and deactivated during meditation and participants reported that anxiety decreased by 39 percent during practice.

Norman Farb

Mindfulness meditation training modifies the way people experience themselves over time and in the present moment, according to University of Toronto’s Norman Farb and six collaborators.
The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine monitoring of two self-reference processes: Focus on enduring traits (’narrative’ focus) or momentary experience (’experiential’ focus).

They compared participants with no previous meditation experience, and volunteers who completed an 8-week mindfulness meditation training to increase attention on the present.

Herbert Benson

Brain scans of inexperienced and experienced meditators differed significantly in tasks that required these two forms of self-awareness: the self across time and in the present moment.
These two experiences are usually integrated but can be dissociated through mindfulness attention training.
Results suggest that mindfulness training enables people to focus on the present moment without the distraction of intrusive, ruminative thoughts which can increase stress.

Manoj Bhasin

Mindfulness-based stress management has significant long term effects by modifying gene expression.
Harvard’s Herbert Benson, who led research on “the relaxation response” almost four decades ago, along with colleagues including Harvard’s Manoj Bhasin and Abbott Northwestern Hospital Jeffery Dusek and four others, assert that meditation evokes “a specific genomic response that counteracts the harmful genomic effects of stress.”

Jeffrey Dusek

Genes associated with inflammation and stress are less active and those involved in energy metabolism, mitochondrial function, insulin secretion and telomere maintenance are activated.

Bhasin, Dusek and team measured peripheral blood transcriptome in experienced and inexperienced meditators before and after they listened to a relaxation response-inducing tape or a health education message.

Both short-term and long-term practitioners showed significant temporal gene expression changes with a greater effect among the experienced meditators.

This and other research evidence supports the effectiveness of mindfulness attention training as a stress management practice.
Mindful attention training enables people to voluntarily control body processes like respiration and heart rate, which reduces perceived stress.
The practice can induce calm thoughts that reciprocally reduce the physical expressions of stress.

Jonathan Smallwood

Like other stress management techniques, this practice requires willingness and commitment to take full advantage of benefits demonstrated in lab studies.

If efforts to cultivate mindfulness falter, mind-wandering or “self-generated thoughts” can be channeled away from self-referential worries to enable creativity problem-solving and planning.

Jessica Andrews-Hanna

Max Planck Institute’s Jonathan Smallwood and Jessica Andrews-Hanna of University of Colorado argue that “a wandering mind helps project past and future selves.”

Thomas Suddendorf

Similarly, University of Queensland’s Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis of University of Auckland posit that this hindsight and foresight enables experience and memory integration into a sense of self through this “mental time travel.”

Michael Corballis

University of California, Santa Barbara’s Benjamin Baird collaborated with Jonathan Smallwood and four colleagues to evaluate the impact of mind-wandering on a creativity task during a demanding task, rest, or an undemanding task.

Benjamin Baird

They found that engaging in an undemanding task during an incubation period led to substantial performance improvements, suggesting the value of mind-wandering to develop creative solutions.

Although mindfulness training has been reliably associated with effective stress management, even moments of mind-wandering can be channeled to productive ends in creative problem-solving.

-*How applicable are mindfulness attention training practice for workplace stress?

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RELATED POSTS

Motivation to Manage Stress

Mindful Attention (Part 2)

Social Support (Part 3)

Music (Part 4)

Decrease Stress, Increase Collaboration through Group Singing?

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Natural Environments Enhance “Vitality” and Reduce Stress

Sleep

Chronotypes: Sleep “Fingerprints,” “Social Jet Lag,” and Health

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Look for related posts on:

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Physical Exercise (Part 5)

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Evidence-Based Stress Management – Vitamins, Probiotics – Part 1 of 5

Symbolic Practice Improves Memorization, Performance

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Edward Warburton

Expert ballet dancers are skilled performing artists with strong non-verbal communication competencies.
In addition, they are efficient learners of complex three-dimensional sequences, who master cognitively-challenging novel tasks under time constraints and with high expectations of quality performance.

Margaret Wilson

Symbolic practice of these demanding tasks through “marking” can improve performance and reduce the mental strain of learning, mastering, and performing at an expert level, and may be applicable to enhancing other types of performance.

Molly Lynch

Former professional ballet dancer Edward Warburton of University of California, Santa Cruz collaborated with UCSC colleague Margaret Wilson and their counterparts at University of California, Irvine, Molly Lynch and Shannon Cuykendall to investigate the impact of dancers performing an abbreviated version of choreography during rehearsal by “marking” to conserve energy and to aid recall of complex routines.
One example is marking using a finger rotation to represent a turn.

Shannon Cuykendall

Warburton and team compared the quality of performances by dancers who rehearsed by “marking” and by performing the full choreography.

Guided by the “embodied cognitive-load hypothesis,” they reasoned that if marking provided only reduced physical effort, then there should be no difference in the quality of performance between marking and full-effort rehearsals.

In contrast, they found that the performances rehearsed by “marking” were superior, suggesting that marking’s symbolic practice provides cognitive as well as physical benefits.
Marking reduced the cognitive load during rehearsal to allow more effective memory encoding.

David Kirsh

David Kirsh, University of California San Diego further investigated the assertion that “dance is embodied thought” and that the body is an instrument of cognition by collecting video and interview data as University of Cambridge research fellow Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance company developed a new choreographic sequence.

Wayne McGregor

Kirsh reported that marking was more effective than mental simulation without symbolic movement in enhancing performance.
He noted that marking is “physical thinking,” a simplified representational vehicle for thought, and a form of thinking because it is a:

Gestural language for encoding aspects of a target movement
Way to prime neural systems involved in the target movement
Method to increase precision in mentally projecting aspects of the target movement.

External representations like marking, diagrams, illustrations, instructions reinforce memory through other sensory channels like vision or audition, providing “scaffolding” to enhance recall.

These varied symbolic representations also enhance cognitive power because they:

Reduce the “costs” of making inferences and thoughts
Are a shared thought “object”
Create lasting referents
Facilitate repeat representation at other times and places
May be more intuitive than cognitive representations
Enable information encoding and “projection” to form complex thought structures

Warburton and team suspect that other symbolic rehearsal techniques like whispering, gesturing, and sub-vocalizing could provide similar performance improvements in other areas such as language learning, and are currently investigating these applications.

-*How effective have you found symbolic representations in reducing “cognitive load” and improving performance?

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Working with Ambiguity at Work

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“Leading during uncertain business conditions” and “tolerating ambiguity” are explicitly-sought skills in Silicon Valley position descriptions.
These competencies are crucial to navigate frequent, sometimes surprising restructurings and layoffs.

Rolf Wank

In contrast, employees outside the U.S. enjoy greater job certainty and worker protection in some countries, as outlined in Ruhr-Universität Bochum researcher Rolf Wank’s survey of typical German employment relationships .

He summarized “work-arounds” to Gremany’s current system that might require employees to develop skills in working with more ambiguous employment agreements.

Frank Shipper

Tolerance for Ambiguity has been measured in a scale developed by Frank Shipper of Salisbury University, adapted from earlier work by Stanley Budner, then of New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Similarly, David Wilkinson of Oxford drew on his background in UK military and police organizations to propose Modes of Leadership based on varying developmental, perceptual, and cognitive styles of ambiguity tolerance:

Mode One – Technical Leaders manage ambiguity by ignoring, denying, or creating premature, inaccurate or false “certainty”
They tend to be risk averse and are more directive in leading others
Mode Two – Cooperative Leaders seek to “disambiguate uncertainty” and build teams to mitigate risk
Mode Three – Collaborative Leaders prefer consensual alignment among team values and execution goals through explicit team discussion
Mode Four – Generative Leaders use ambiguity to find opportunity by drawing on “emotional resilience” and continuous learning.

David Wilkinson

In 2008, Wilkinson began investigating two additional leadership modes for inclusion in this framework.
He also posited an “ambiguity continuum” among risk, ambiguity, vagueness, uncertainty and chaos.

Creative scientists and artists have long understood the importance of the ambiguous “incubation” period when solutions germinate.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein, known for his breakthrough insights in physics, argued for imagining solutions when the present situation is unclear:

° Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere

° Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions

° Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create

Richard Diebenkorn

Painter Richard Diebenkorn of UCLA echoed Einstein’s sentiment in several entries in Notes to Myself on Beginning a Painting, in which he coached himself to risk, tolerate uncertainty, and persist in the search for solutions:

° Attempt (sic) what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.

° Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The spirit of Diebenkorn’s advice to himself was codified decades earlier by poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke in his oft-quoted Letters to a Young Poet.

…Try to love the questions themselves…
Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them….
Someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Both creative artists and business leaders recognize the crucial importance of working with and through ambiguous conditions to produce breakthrough solutions.

° What approaches help you tolerate ambiguity?
° How can ambiguity tolerance be increased?

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Recasting Unattainable Goals into Refreshed Options

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Several previous posts have showcased research findings linking perseverance and persistence with expert performance and career advancement.

Faizel Mohidin

Mind Map expert Faizel Mohidin shared an augmented understanding of SMART goals in a compelling graphic that showcases the necessity of goal achievability.

Goals may become unattainable due to:

Lack of opportunity (older than usual childbearing age, divorce)
Negative life event (death of a spouse, job loss)
Lack of resources (insufficient time, health, or money), or
Unattractive opportunity cost

Carsten Wrosch

Michael Scheier

Concordia University’ s Carsten Wrosch collaborated with Michael Scheier of Carnegie Mellon University, University of British Columbia’s Gregory Miller, Richard Schulz of University of Pittsburgh, and University of Miami’s Charles Carver to examine disengagement from unattainable, goals, reengagement with more achievable goals, and subjective well-being among 280 volunteers in three studies.

Gregory Miller

Richard Schulz

Participants rated their ease in stopping focus on unattainable goals, and the amount of effort they invested in alternate achievable goals, along with multiple measures of physical and mental well-being.

They found that people who disengaged from unattainable goals and reengaged with attainable goals reported higher subjective well-being, lower stress, fewer intrusive thoughts about personal issues, and feeling more control in life circumstances than those who persisted with objectively unattainable goals.

Jutta Heckhausen

Charles Carver

Wrosh built on these findings that goal disengagement and reengagement can increase self-efficacy and emotional self-regulation by collaborating with Jutta Heckhausen of University of California, Irvine and Wake Forest University’s William Fleeson, to investigate the special case of women approaching and past the usual age of childbearing.

William Fleeson

Their observations led them to propose an “action-phase model of developmental regulation,” in which people close to a developmental deadline like end of fertility, focus on “goal pursuit.”

In contrast, people past a developmental deadline without attaining a time-limited goal tend to focus on “disengagement and self-protection.”

This research suggests tempering advice to “never give up” with an assesssment of goal feasibility to decide whether to disengage, then reengage with a more achievable aspiration.

-*What approaches expedite disengagement from an unattainable goal and reengagement with a revised, achievable objective?

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Decrease Stress, Increase Collaboration through Group Singing?

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Björn Vickhoff

Helge Malmgren

Collaborative activities including dancing and cooking, have been shown to increase inclusion, cohesiveness and oxytocin and may reduce stress.

Cross-disciplinary researchers in Sweden demonstrated the stress-reducing effect of another interactive group activity, choral singing.

Mathias Engwall

Gunnar Nyberg

University of Gothenburg ‘s Björn Vickhoff,Helge Malmgren, Mathias Engwall, Rebecka Jörnsten with Gunnar Nyberg and Johan Snygg of Sahlgrenska University Hospital joined composer Rickard Åström, church cantor Seth-Reino Ekström and University of Newcastle, Australia’s Michael Nilsson
to monitor heart rates, respiration, skin conductance, and finger temperature of volunteers who sang together.
Choral singing synchronized singers’ neural activities and muscular movement, and lowered heart rate, according to lead researcher Vickhoff.

Michael Nilsson

Rickard Åström

Åström opined that choral singing provides “guided breathing” that has similar stress-reducing effects as focused breathing in meditative practice.
He noted the additional social benefits of affiliation with others, and a sense of inclusion and belonging.

Seth-Reino Ekström

Vickhoff’s research team measured Heart Rate (HR) and Heart Rate Variability (HRV) measured by Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA).

Volunteer singers performed three tasks:

Hum a single tone and breathe as needed
Sing a hymn [Härlig är is jorden” – Lovely is the Earth] with free, unguided breathing
Sing a slow mantra and breathe between phrases.

The team found that these differing musical structures influenced heart rates: Unison singing of standard song structures caused heart rate synchronization across participants.

Vickhoff explained that “…through song we can exercise a certain control over mental states,” because singing regulates activity in the vagus nerve, which is affected by emotional experiences.
Non-verbal communication in choral singing and related emotional experiences of this collaborative effort can affect vocal timbre, so songs with long phrases achieve the same slowed breathing and heart rate that can occur during yoga and mindfulness meditation.

The research team is now investigating whether this biological synchronization can induce a shared mental perspective that strengthens collaboration.
This may have been the theory behind IBM’s company songs, and shared activities like physical exercises in Japanese workplaces.

Eduardo Salas

Drew Rozell

Evidence for links among biological synchronization, shared mindset and collaboration is mixed or equivocal.
Naval Air Warfare Center’s Eduardo Salas with Drew Rozell and Brian Mullen, then of Syracuse University and Florida Maxima Corporation’s James Driskell found no significant effect of team building through shared activities and purpose on performance in their meta-analytic study.

Brian Mullen

Salas, Rozell, Mullen, and Driskell found that team building interventions focused on interpersonal relations (like Vickhoff’s “shared mind”), goal setting, or problem solving showed little impact on performance.

Susan Cohen

However, University of Southern California’s Susan Cohen and Diane Bailey, now of Stanford, concluded that group cohesiveness, social integration, and positive emotional tone were associated with group performance across a number of studies.

Diane Bailey

Cohen and Bailey’s findings in their meta-analytic study suggest that cohesiveness, social integration, and positive emotional tone should be evaluated when considering choral singing’spotential impact on reducing stress and developing a “we mindset” for collaborative work performance.

-*Which group activities strengthen collaborative team performance?
-*Which team activities augment reduce the physical signs of stress?
-*Which shared activities are appropriate to introduce in a work setting?

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Biased Time Perception – Mind Time, Clock Time, and Einstein

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Albert Einstein

Eminent physicist and everyone’s favorite genius, Albert Einstein, suggested that most people have a biased perception of time: “The distinction between past, present and future is an illusion, although a persistent one.”

Molly Harrower

More than half a century after Einstein’s groundbreaking theories of relativity a pioneering psychologist Rorschach expert Molly Harrower illustrated the emotional component of time perception in a poem she wrote during a time of personal transition and loss:

According to Einstein,
The faster we travel
The slower time passes
But the loneliness factor
Is constant

Wilhelm Wundt

By the time that Harrower published her The Therapy of Poetry in 1972, experimental psychologists from Wilhelm Wundt to Paul Fraisse and Kurt Lewin measured the psychophysics of time perceptions.

Philip Zimbardo

Stanford’s Philip Zimbardo with John Boyd extended this work to demonstrate how time perspective – whether past, present or future and tinged with negative or positive emotion – is related to differences in school completion, health behaviors including smoking, drinking, drug use, contraception and driving, coping with homelessness and job search.

John Boyd

Zimbardo became well-known following the disturbing results of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and later began investigating subjective Time Perspective (TP) using a self-report inventory

They identified six time perspectives:

Positive Past
Negative Past
Hedonistic Present
Fatalist Present
Future
Transcendental Future

Zimbardo and Boyd suggested an optimal orientation to time includes a calibrated perspective across the six time orientations.

Citing his own childhood in the South Bronx, Zimbardo argued that schools convert Present Hedonists into Future-oriented time perceivers, and increase opportunities for economic advancement.

Robert Levine

Robert Levine of California State University, Fresno, differentiated among measured time and subjective time by defining:

Clock time
Event time
Natural time

He asked how people use time in different regions, and the impact of these choices on relationships and health.
Like Zimbardo and Boyd, he advocates developing the ability to move across time orientations and time-related behaviors.

Claudia Hammond

Some of these time perspectives can include subjective biases, including an “elastic” experience of time – sometimes shorter or longer than clock time, according to the BBC’s Claudia Hammond.

She identified several biases in time perception, such as overestimating elapsed time during a frightening experience and shortening of perceived time during a pleasant experience or as one ages.

Douwe Draaisma

One explanation for the feeling like time accelerates as one gets older is the “proportionality theory“, according to University of Groningen’s Douwe Draaisma.

In this view, a year – 365 days most years – can feel brief when one is 40 years old and has already lived almost 14,600 days.
The same year might feel longer to an 8 year old who had lived almost 2920 days, because it is a larger proportion of experienced time.

Vincent Prohaska

Another time perception bias is “forward telescoping,” the feeling that past events occurred more recently than they actually did, according to Lehman College’s Vincent Prohaska with colleagues Norman Brown and Robert Belli.
“Reverse telescoping” refers to past events of the same elapsed time that seem to have taken place even longer ago.

The Holiday Paradox is another time perception anomaly in which time away from one’s usual routine feeling like it passed both quickly and occurred over a long period of time, perhaps due to the concentration of new experiences and the need to concentrate on processing novel information.

Similarly, “Reminiscence Bump” enables many people to recall experiences between 15 and 25, including prominent news events and cultural trends including music, attire, interests.

University of Chicago’s Norman Bradburn suggested that these distortions may occur because many experiences during memorable or “critical” developmental periods are usually novel, distinctive, personally-involving, and emotionally-tinged.

Because these events were memorable, they may seem to have occurred more recently because people often associate clearer memories with more recent occurrences.
This “inner chronometry” of time tracking can be distorted by emotions, attention, expectations, task demands, and even ambient temperature, according to “the Clarity Hypothesis” to explain these perceptual biases.

-*How do you mitigate time biases?
-*How have you seen these time biases affect and relate to other areas of life?

Role Pioneers May Encounter “The Glass Cliff”

1 Reply

Sally Ride

Marissa Mayer

Holding a role usually occupied by the other gender can lead to significant media coverage, such as Sally Ride’s selection as an astronaut or Marissa Mayer’s appointment as CEO of Yahoo while in the later stages of her first pregnancy.

However, incumbents of roles usually held by people of the other gender can evoke harsh judgments about competence and suitability for leadership roles, according to Yale’s Victoria Brescoll and Erica Dawson with Eric Luis Uhlmann of HEC Paris.

Victoria Brescoll

This effect was most noticeable when both male and female leaders in “gender-incongruous” roles made minor errors in experimental studies.
Both male and female evaluators judged minor mistakes as indicators of role incompetence when male and female leaders held jobs typically performed by the other gender.

Erica Dawson

Brescoll, Dawson and Uhlmann suggested that “gender-incongruous” roles are seen as “ambiguous” by observers, leading to uncertainty, and negative assessments to “restore implicit order.”
The team referred to this rater bias as the “glass cliff effect.”

The researchers concluded that “the high status and senior leadership achieved by both men and women in gender-incongruent roles is fragile, vulnerable and unstable.”

Eric Luis Uhlmann

This effect may be due to both the role’s gender incongruity and high status.
An earlier blog post highlighted Alison Fragale’s demonstration that higher status individuals are judged more harshly than lower status people when they make the same mistakes.

Alison Fragale

Her team at University of North Carolina found that observers in two experiments attributed greater intentionality, malevolence, self-concern to the actions of high status wrongdoers – and recommended harsher punishment for the same actions that earned lower status people “the benefit of the doubt.”

Although Brescol, Dawson and Uhlmann did not offer recommendations to mitigate the risks of being a pioneer in holding non-traditional job roles, Fragale’s team found that high status wrongdoers could protect from the impact of subsequent mistakes by demonstrating, warmth and concern for others and engaging in charitable giving.

Other strategies to consider include:

Cultivating strong executive alliances and sponsorship
Assembling a risk mitigation team to provide expert messaging during a crisis, focusing on external attributions of the error
Balancing demonstrated competence with the “humanness” of a small error
Offering plans for future action unrelated to the error to demonstrate decisive leadership and action-orientation.

-*What approaches are most effective to mitigate “The Glass Cliff”?

Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Master Coach | Coach Supervisor+Mentor Coach |

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