Tag Archives: stress

“Surface Acting” At Work Leads to Stress Spillover

David Wagner

Situations outside the workplace can affect employees’ productivity, commitment, mindset, attitudes, and health.

Similarly, experiences at work can affect employees’ quality of life at work and outside of work.
Workplace Employee Assistance Programs, on-site medical centers, concierges, meals, and fitness centers are intended to address this bi-directional influence to improve employee retention and productivity.

Christopher Barnes

When employees suppress their true feelings about work experiences, they engage in “surface acting” as they display appropriate, but unfelt facial expressions, verbal interactions, and body language.

Brent Scott

Surface acting at work was associated with emotional exhaustion, work-to-family conflict, and insomnia outside of work for more than 70 volunteers in a high stress public service occupation, found Singapore Management University’s David T. Wagner, Christopher M. Barnes of University of Washington, and Brent A. Scott of Michigan State University.

Arlie Hochschild

“Emotional labor” was Arlie Hochshild’s earlier term for “surface acting” in customer service interactions when employees present prescribed verbalizations and emotions.

She contrasted “surface acting” with “deep acting” in which the person:

Exhibits the emotion actually felt,
Uses past emotional experiences to elicit real emotion and empathic connection with others, in a form of “organizational method acting.”

Christina Maslach

“Surface acting” at work can lead to occupational “burnout,” characterized by emotional exhaustion, detachment from others, and reduced workplace performance, noted University of California Berkeley’s Christina Maslach and Susan Jackson.

Céleste Brotheridge

In contrast, high emotional labor with deep acting was associated with a greater sense of personal accomplishment in research by University of Regina’s Celeste Brotheridge and Alicia Grandey of Penn State.

Veikko Surakka

Recipients of “surface acting” are usually accurately detect that it’s an inauthentic display, according to University of Tampere Veikko Surakka and Jari K Hietanen of University of Helsinki.

Patricia Hewlin

Similarly, “Facades of Conformity,” impression management, and
unwilling compliance are associated with generalized stress and reduced quality of life outside of work, according to Georgetown’s Patricia Hewlin, University of Lethbridge’s Karen H. Hunter, Andrew A. Luchak of University of Alberta, and Athabasca University’s Kay Devine.

These three experiences are defined as:

Kay Devine

Facades of Conformity (FOC), or behaviors enacted to appear that an employee embraces organizational values.
These behaviors usually are associated with non-participative work environments, minority status, and high self-monitoring.

Terence Mitchell

Impression management, characterized by ingratiating behaviors in two-person relationships which can favorably influence career outcomes, according to Georgia Tech’s Robert C. Liden and Terence R. Mitchell of University of Washington.

Compliance, or publicly stating changed beliefs in response to external pressures, without truly modifying personal convictions, according to Leon Festinger.

Leon Festinger

Most people at work encounter situations in which they choose to behave in “appropriate” ways that are inconsistent with their true feelings, and may experience similar stress spillover from “surface acting” at work.

-*How do you prevent “burnout” when workplace settings seem to require “surface acting”?

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©Kathryn Welds

Are You Excited Yet? Anxiety as “Excitement” to Improve Performance

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Alison Wood Brooks

People can improve task performance in public speaking, mathematical problem solving, and karaoke singing, by reappraising anxiety as “excitement,” according to Harvard’s Alison Wood Brooks.

Using silent self-talk messages (“I am excited”) or reading self-direction messages (“Get excited!”) fosters an “opportunity mind-set” by increasing alignment between physical arousal and situational appraisal.

Jeremy Jamieson

“Excitement” is typically viewed as a positive, pleasant emotion that can improve performance, according to Harvard’s Jeremy Jamieson and colleagues.

In contrast, anxiety drains working memory capacity, and decreases self-confidence, self-efficacy, and performance before or during a task, according to Michael W. Eysenck of University of London.

Despite these differences, anxiety and excitement have similar physiological arousal profiles, but different effects on performance.

Michael Eysenck

Efforts to transform anxiety into calmness can be ineffective due to the large shift from negative emotion to neutral or positive emotion and from physiological activation to lower arousal levels, noted Brooks.

Stefan Hofmann

Such efforts to calm physiological arousal during anxiety can result in a paradoxical increase in the suppressed emotion, reported Stefan Hofmann and colleagues of Boston University.
However, most people in Woods’ studies said they believed that this is the best way to handle anxiety.

Stanley Schachter

Physiological similarities can confuse experiences of anxiety and excitement, demonstrated in studies by Columbia’s Stanley Schacter and Jerome Singer of SUNY.
Anxiety’s similarity to excitement can be used to relabel high “anxiety” as “excitement.”
This shift can mitigate anxiety’s negative impact on performance.

Jerome Singer

Brooks elicited anxiety among volunteers by telling them that they their task was to present an impromptu, videotaped speech.

For some participants, she explained that it is “normal” to feel discomfort and asked them to “take a realistic perspective on this task by recognising that there is no reason to feel anxious” and “the situation does not present a threat to you…there are no negative consequences...”
She also instructed volunteers to say aloud randomly-assigned self-statements like “I am excited.”

People who stated “I am excited” before their speech were rated as more persuasive, more competent, more confident, and more persistent (spoke longer), than participants who said “I am calm.”

Brooks evaluated peoples’ reactions to another anxiety-provoking task, performing a karaoke song for an audience, and rated by voice recognition software for “singing accuracy” based on:

Volume (quiet-loud),
Pitch (distance from true pitch),
Note duration (accuracy of breaks between notes).

This score determined participants’ payment for participating in the study.

Before performing, she asked participants to make a randomly-assigned self-statement:

“I am anxious,”
“I am excited,”
“I am calm,”
“I am angry.”
“I am sad.”
No statement.

Following their performance, volunteers rated their anxiety, excitement, and confidence in their singing ability.
People who said that they were “excited” had higher pulse rates than other groups, confirming that self-statements can affect physical experiences of emotion.

Volunteers who said “I am excited” had the highest scores for singing accuracy and also for confidence in singing ability.

In contrast, those who said, “I am anxious” had the lowest scores for singing accuracy, suggesting that anxiety is associated with lower performance.

Brooks elicited anxiety on “a very difficult IQ test…under time pressure” that would determine their payment for participation.
To evoke further anxiety, she concluded, “Good luck minimising your loss.”

Before the test, participants read a statement:

“Try to remain calm” or
“Try to get excited.”

Those instructed to “get excited” produced more correct answers than those who tried to “remain calm.”

Reappraising anxiety as “excitement” increased the subjective experience of “excitement” instead of anxiety, and improved subsequent performance in each of these tasks.

Stéphane Côté

These reappraisals of physical experiences evoked an “opportunity mind-set” and a “stress-is-enhancing” mind-set, found University of Toronto’s Stéphane Côté and Christopher Miners.
These appraisals enabled superior performance across different anxiety-arousing situations.

In contrast, i nauthentic emotional displays can be physically and psychologically demanding, and often reduce performance.

People have “profound control and influence…over…emotions,” according to Woods.
She noted that “Saying ‘I am excited’ represents a simple, minimal intervention…to prime an opportunity mind-set and improve performance…

Advising employees to say ‘I am excited’ before important performance tasks or simply encouraging them to ‘get excited’ may increase their confidence, improve performance, and boost beliefs in their ability to perform well in the future.”

-*How effective have you found focusing on “excitement” instead of “calm” in managing anxiety?

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©Kathryn Welds

Costs of Workplace Incivility

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Christine Pearson

A single incident of incivility in the workplace can result in significant operational costs, reported Christine Pearson of Thunderbird School of Global Management and Christine Porath of Georgetown University.

Additional consequences of workplace incivility include:

Decreased work effort due to disengagement,
Christine Porath
Less time at work to reduce contact with offensive co-workers or managers,
Decreased work productivity due to ruminating about incivility incidents,
Less commitment to the organization,
Attrition.

P.M. Forni

Other organizational symptoms include:

Increased customer complaints,
Accentuated cultural and communications barriers,
Reduced confidence in leadership,
Less adoption of changed organizational processes,
Reduced willingness to accept additional responsibility and make discretionary work efforts.

Workplace incivility behaviors were described as “rude and discourteous, displaying a lack of regard for others,” noted Pearson and Lynne Andersson, then of St. Joseph’s University.
“Uncivil” behaviors were enumerated in The Baltimore Workplace Civility Study by Johns Hopkins’ P.M. Forni and Daniel L. Buccino with David Stevens and Treva Stack of University of Baltimore:

Refusing to collaborate on a team project,
Shifting blame for an error to a co-worker,
Reading another’s mail,
Neglecting to say “please,” “thank you”,
Taking a co-worker’s food from the office refrigerator without asking.

Respondents classified more extreme unacceptable behaviors as “violent”:

Pushing a co-worker during an argument,
Yelling at a co-worker,
Firing a subordinate during a disagreement,
Criticising a subordinate in public,
Using foul language in the workplace.

Gary Namie

Workplace bullying was included in Gary Namie’s Campaign Against Workplace Bullying.
He defined bullying as “the deliberate repeated, hurtful verbal mistreatment of a person (target) by a cruel perpetrator (bully).

His survey of more than 1300 respondents found that:

More than one-third of respondents observed bullying in the previous two years,
More than 80% of perpetrators were workplace supervisors,
Women bullied as frequently as men,
Women were targets of bullying 75% of the time,
Few bullies were punished, transferred, or terminated from jobs.

Costs of health-related symptoms experienced by bullying targets included:

Depression,
Sleep loss, anxiety, inability to concentrate, which reduced work productivity,
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among 31% of women and 21% of men,
Frequent rumination about past bullying, leading to inattention, poor concentration, and reduced productivity.

Widespread prevalence of workplace incivility was also reported by Forni, who suggested ways to improve workplace interactions and inclusion:

Assume that others have positive intentions,
Pay attention, listen,
Include all co-workers in workplace activities,
Avoid complaints,
Acknowledge others,
Give praise when warranted,
Respect others’ opinions, time, space, indirect refusals,
Avoid asking personal questions,
Be selective in asking for favors,
Sincerely apologize when warranted,
Provide constructive suggestions for improvement,
Maintain personal grooming, health, and work environment,
Accept responsibility and blame, if deserved.

More than 95% of respondents in The Baltimore Workplace Civility Study suggested, “Keep stress and fatigue at manageable levels,” a challenging goal for leaders who shape workplace cultures.

Organizational change recommendations include:

Instituting a grievance process to investigate and address complaints of incivility,
Selecting prospective employees with effective interpersonal skills,
Offering a clearly-written policy on interpersonal conduct,
Adopting flexibility in scheduling, assignments, and work-life issues.

-*How do you handle workplace incivility when you observe or experience it?

©Kathryn Welds

Workplace Incivility is Contagious, Damaging

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James Bartlett

Workplace incivility has measurable negative consequences including reduced employee engagement and productivity, according to North Carolina State University’s James E. Bartlett and Michelle E. Bartlett with Florida Atlantic University’s Thomas G. Reio.

Trevor Foulk

Rudeness in the workplace is contagious and leads people to be vigilant for subsequent slights, reported University of Florida’s Trevor Foulk, Andrew Woolum, and Amir Erez.
They suggested that low-level workplace hostility enables similar behavior throughout the organization, leading to eroded culture and productivity.

Andrew Woolum

Ninety volunteers practiced negotiation with partners, and those who rated their initial negotiation partner as rude were more likely to be rated as rude by a subsequent partner.

Participants seemed to assimilate and convey the first partner’s rudeness.
The effect persisted during the week between the first and second negotiations.

Amir Erez

Foulk’s team staged interactions between an apologetic late-arriving participant and the study leader, who responded neutrally or rudely.
Then, volunteers completed a timed task to distinguish real words from nonsense words.

Participants who observed the leader’s rude response more quickly identified rude words in a task than participants who had observed the neutral interaction.
Observing rude interactions can “prime” people’s awareness and sensitivity to future uncivil interactions.

Walter Mischel

People who witnessed rudeness were more likely to be rude to others, confirming the impact of observing aggression on future behavior, earlier demonstrated in often-cited “Bobo” experiments by Stanford’s Walter Mischel, Dorothea Ross and Sheila Ross.

Mischel’s experiment with Bobo doll

Foulk’s group also observed this priming effect when volunteers watched a video of a rude workplace interaction, then answered a fictitious customer neutral-toned email.
Participants’ responses were more likely to be hostile than those who viewed a polite interaction before responding.

“Rudeness will flavor the way you interpret ambiguous cues,” noted Foulk, who contended that harsh interactions can reduce collaboration and trust in the workplace.

-*How do you stop the spread of workplace incivility?

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©Kathryn Welds

Anxiety Linked to Risk of Behaving Unethically

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Sreedhari Desai

Anxious people were more likely to act with self-interested unethical behavior in studies by University of North Carolina’s Sreedhari Desai and Maryam Kouchaki of Northwestern.

Maryam Kou

Anxiety was also associated with increased threat perception and decreased concern about personal unethical actions in simulated subordinate–supervisor pairs.

Desai noted that “individuals who feel anxious and threatened can take on self-defensive behaviors and focus narrowly on their own basic needs and self-interest.
This can cause them to be less mindful of principles that guide ethical and moral reasoning – and make them rationalize their own actions as acceptable.”

Charles Carver

Engaging in unethical behaviors may offer more options and greater control over outcomes, found University of Miami’s Charles Carver and Michael Scheier of Carnegie Mellon.
Unethical behavior was also associated with feelings of greater autonomy and influence, particularly in ambiguous situations, according to Ohio State’s Roy Lewicki.

Michael Scheier

People who violate ethical norms can experience a ‘cheater’s high‘ instead of guilt, found University of Washington’s Nicole E. Ruedy and Celia Moore of London Business School.

Roy Lewicki

Cheaters in Ruedy’s research reported emotional uplift and self-satisfaction instead of guilt, and Paul Ekman of University of California, San Francisco referred to this exuberance among some cheaters as “duping delight.”

Nicole Ruedy

In Ruedy’s studies, nearly 180 people completed a four-minute anagram task to earn $1 for every correctly unscrambled word.
Participants then rated current feelings from positive to negative, both before and after the task.

Celia Moore

Volunteers’ actual answers on the task were compared from imprints between their answer sheets to determine which participants reported inaccurate results.

More than 40% of these volunteers wrote in additional answers to increase their earnings, and reported significantly positive feelings after cheating on the task.

Even when Ruedy’s team told volunteers that researchers knew participants may be providing inaccurate reports in an insoluble anagram task, more than half the participants reported implausibly high scores.

Cheaters had higher levels of positive affect even when confronted with the team’s awareness of their potential deceit.
They also showed higher levels of self-satisfaction and feeling clever, capable, accomplished, satisfied, and superior.

Earning more money didn’t add to the “cheater’s high,” suggesting a top threshold for positive feelings associated with cheating.

Maurice Schweitzer

These findings suggest that organizational leaders can increase employee quality-of-life and diminish unethical workplace behaviors by clarifying roles, which reduces anxiety.

Leaders also can reduce employees’ anxiety by:

Paul Ekman:

Setting realistic expectations for employee workload,
Adopting Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) and flex time,
Emphasizing the value of experimentation, flexibility, and innovation.

-*How have you seen high-anxiety workplaces affect employees’ ethical judgment?

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©Kathryn Welds

Managing Workplace Interruptions

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Edward Sykes

Most office workers spend an average of two hours a day doing unplanned tasks, according to Sheridan Institute’s Edward Sykes.
These work interruptions are associated with:

Disrupted progress toward tasks completion,
Reduced task focus,
Longer task completion time,
Increased errors, according to Rutgers’ Quintus Jett and Jennifer George of Rice University.

Quintus Jett

Unplanned tasks decrease productivity and are characterized by:

Intrusions – Unplanned interactions initiated by others: Synchronous communication including instant message, phone call, or a coworkers visiting to talk,

Distractions – Unplanned focus change from a task to environmental conditions like other conversations,

Breaks – Unscheduled task stoppage to rest, visit the restroom, have a meal,

Discrepancy Detection – Unplanned task stoppage to correct errors or redirect work effort toward a revised objective.

Jennifer George

Unplanned workplace interruptions are increasingly prevalent due to rising incidence of:

Open and collaborative workspaces,
Technological interruptions,
Meetings.

Sheldon Cohen

Open space floor plans increase unplanned interruptions, perceived stress, and “cognitive fatigue,” due to greater noise levels and reduced privacy for employees.
These factors also reduce employees’ job satisfaction, found Carnegie Mellon’s Sheldon Cohen and E. M. De Croon and team of University of Amsterdam.

Julie Renneker

Synchronous communications are more disruptive than asynchronous communications, which allow response at a convenient time and mitigate the negative impact of task-shifting on cognitive load and stress level, noted University of Texas’s Julie Rennecker and Lindsey Godwin, now of Champlain College.

Greg Oldham

Strategies to mitigate the impact of work disruptions include time management and boundary setting, according to Tulane’s Greg Oldham, Carol Kulik of University of South Australia and Florida State University’s Lee Stepina.
They suggested that employees:

Carol Kulik

-“Batch” communication to check email and returning phone calls at specified intervals,

-Block technology pop-ups, alerts, sounds to avoid startling interruptions,

James Tyler

-Organize tasks around energy peaks, with tasks requiring the most effort and concentration earlier in the workday and after a break, also advocated by Purdue’s James Tyler and Kathleen Burns of University of Wisconsin,

Kathleen Burns

-Take active breaks, such as walking outside to breathe outdoor air,

John Aiello

-Schedule interruption-free intervals, to increase perceived control over interruptions and reduce stress, also cited by Duke’s Andrew Carton and John Aiello of Rutgers,

-Create “work-arounds” for open space floor plans by:
.Installing higher cubicle dividers,
.Providing noise-cancelling headphones,
.Offering white noise machines to reduce ambient notice,
.Designating reservable private work rooms for audio privacy,

-Reduce meeting frequency to focus on issues that require group discussion, consensus, commitment.

A counterpoint argument is that task interruptions provide benefits, proposed by Jett and George.
The argued that unplanned and planned interruptions :

Prevent widespread rework when employees alert colleagues to a work discrepancy or error,
Increase productivity during repetitive or well-learned tasks that may lead to boredom, errors, or lost task focus.

-*How do you reduce the negative impact of workplace interruptions?

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©Kathryn Welds

Stress Increases Women’s Performance and Empathic Attunement, but not Men’s

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Livia Tomova

Task performance, social interaction skills, and empathic attunement increase for women under stress, but not for men.
Women seek social support (“become prosocial”), but men turn toward themselves and away from others when they experience stress, according to University of Vienna’s Livia Tomova and Claus Lamm with Bernadette von Dawans and Markus Heinrichs of University of Freiburg, and Giorgia Silani, International School for Advanced Studies, SISSA-ISAS, Trieste

Claus Lamm

Tomova’s team evaluated the impact of stress on 20 women and 20 men, elicited by Clemens Kirschbaum, Karl-Martin Pirke, and Dirk Hellhammer’s (Universität) Trier Social Stress Test, in which participants delivered a speech and performed mental arithmetic in front of an audience.

Bernadette von Dawans

Tomova and team measured “self-other distinctions” during three types of tasks:

Imitated movements (perceptual-motor task): “Move objects on a shelf according to the instructions of a director,” requiring participants to “disentangle their own visual perspective” from that of the director,
Identifying one’s own emotions or other people’s emotions (emotional task), or
Making a judgment from another person’s perspective (cognitive task).

Markus Heinrichs

As a comparison, 20 men and 20 women completed non-stressful activities like “easy counting.”

Women and men showed similar physiological reactions to stress, but stress decreased men’s performance in all tasks.
In contrast, women’s performance on all tasks improved under stress.

Giorgia Silani

Specifically, women who experienced stress demonstrated more accurate understanding of others’ perspective than non-stressed women and men.
However, men under stress showed less ability to accurately detect others’ probable thoughts and feelings.

Walter Cannon

Studies of stress were pioneered by Harvard’s Walter Cannon, who described the fight-or-flight response in1914, and popularized by Hans Selye of Université de Montréal.

Hans Selye

People can cope with stress by:

Seeking social support or
Reducing “internal cognitive load” that requires additional coping efforts.

One way to reduce “internal cognitive load” is to disconnect from others’ perspective and emotional experience through reducing empathy.
Besides this process of “mentalizing,” empathy also requires people to distinguish their representations of themselves from representations of others.

Clemens Kirschbaum

Women under stress “flexibly disambiguate” mental representations of themselves from others and increase “self-other distinction,” found Tomova’s research group.
This cognitive style enables women to more accurately perceive others’ perspective, enabling more empathic interaction with others in a “tend-and-befriend” approach.

In contrast, men under stress typically turn inward with “increased egocentricity” to conserve mental and emotional resources for “flight-or-flight” responses, leading to less adaptive social interactions.

Dirk Hellhammer

These differences may be rooted in gender-specific learning experiences and biological differences including higher levels of oxytocin (a hormone that mediates social behaviors) among women who experienced stress, noted Tomova’s research team.
As a result, women may seek more frequently seek social support, may interact with others more empathically, and may be rewarded with external help in a reinforcing cycle.

Nikolas Rose

Social support can improve performance and reduce stress, probably because the brain is “wired for sociality,” according to King’s College London’s Nikolas Rose and Joelle Abi-Rached of Harvard.

Gender differences in performance under stress are associated with different styles of “sociality” and empathic insight.

-*How do you maintain task performance and “Emotional Intelligence” of empathy when experiencing stress?

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Facades of Conformity and Surface Acting: Stress for Women, Minorities

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David Wagner

When employees mask their true feelings in work situations, they may engage in “surface acting” — or displaying appropriate, but unfelt facial expressions, verbal interactions, and body language.

Christopher Barnes

Surface acting at work was associated with emotional exhaustion, work-to-family conflict, and insomnia outside of work for more than 70 volunteers in a high stress public service occupation, according to Singapore Management University’s David T. Wagner, Christopher M. Barnes of University of Washington and Brent A. Scott of Michigan State University.

Arlie Hochschild

“Emotional labor” is Arlie Hochshild’s earlier term for “surface acting” in customer service interactions, in which employees present prescribed verbalizations and emotions, even when they are not genuinely felt.

She contrasted “surface acting” with “deep acting” in which the person:

Exhibits the emotion actually felt,
Uses past emotional experiences to elicit real emotion and empathic connection with others, in a form of “organizational method acting.”

Christina Maslach

Surface acting can lead to occupational “burnout,” characterized by emotional exhaustion and detachment from others and reduced workplace performance, noted University of California Berkeley’s Christina Maslach and Susan Jackson.

In addition, Recipients of “surface acting” usually detect that it’s an inauthentic display, according to University of Tampere Veikko Surakka and Jari K Hietanen of University of Helsinki.

Celeste Brotheridge

By contrast, deep acting has been associated with a greater sense of personal accomplishment in research by University of Regina’s Celeste Brotheridge and Alicia Grandey of Penn State.

Patricia Hewlin

Surface Acting can also take a toll, resulting in generalized stress and reduced quality of life outside of work, according to Georgetown’s Patricia Hewlin, and supported by separate findings by University of Lethbridge’s Karen H. Hunter, Andrew A. Luchak of University of Alberta and Athabasca University’s Kay Devine.

They identified stress-inducing behaviors including:

Kay Devine

Facades of Conformity (FOC), involving behaviors enacted to appear that the employee embraces organizational values, usually resulting from non-participative work environments, minority status, self-monitoring, and collectivism.
Terence Mitchell

Impression management, characterized by ingratiating behaviors in two-person relationships.
In the workplace, these can influence career outcomes, according to Georgia Tech’s Robert C. Liden and Terence R. Mitchell of University of Washington.
Leon Festinger

Compliance, identified by publicly stating changed beliefs and opinions in response to external pressures, without modifying actual personal values and beliefs, according to Leon Festinger.

Even people not performing customer-facing roles may encounter situations in which they must behave in “appropriate” ways inconsistent with their true feelings, and experience similar stress spillover from “surface acting” at work.

-*How do you prevent “burnout” when workplace settings seem to require “surface acting”?

-*In what organizational contexts have you observed “Facades of Conformity” and their consequences?

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Reduce Rumination, Stress by Taking a Walk in Nature, Viewing Animals

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More than 50% of people live in urban environments and most have relatively infrequent contact with nature, according to research published by the United Nations.

Theo Lorenc

One consequence is that many urban dwellers with decreased exposure to nature report “changes in psychological functioning” including ruminative thoughts – repetitive thoughts about negative aspects of the self – and depressed feelings, found University College London’s Theo Lorenc, Mark Petticrew, and Steven Cummins with Stephen Clayton of University of Central Lancaster, and David Neary of University of Manchester, University of Liverpool’s Margaret Whitehead, Hilary Thomson of University of Glasgow, University of York’s Amanda Jayne Sowden, and Adrian Renton of University of East London.

Stephen Clayton

Contact with nature can affect cognitive performance as well as emotional experience: Children living in urban environments with consistent views of nature outside their windows, performed better on:

Working memory (backward digit span, backward alphabet span),
Impulse inhibition (matching familiar figures task),
Selective attention (Stroop color-word task),
Concentration (Necker Cube pattern control task), reported by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Andrea Faber Taylor, Frances Kuo, and William C. Sullivan.

Andrea Faber Taylor

Urban environments are thought to require substantial top-down voluntary attentional control to filter relevant from irrelevant stimuli.
At the same time, built landscapes can deplete cognitive resources, worsening performance on tasks requiring focused attention, noted University of Uppsala’s Terry Hartig, Gary W. Evans of University of California, Irvine with Marlis Mang of Planning & Design Solutions.

Terry Hartig

Walking for 90 minutes in nature reduced rumination, blood flow, and neural activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex (sgPFC), reported Stanford’s Gregory N. Bratman, Kevin S. Hahn, Gretchen C. Daily, and James J. Gross with J. Paul Hamilton of Laureate Institute for Brain Research.
This brain area has been linked to self-focused behavioral withdrawal and rumination among both healthy and depressed people.

Gregory Bratman

More than 35 volunteers rated their proneness to ruminate with negative thoughts, then half walked alone for 90-minutes without music through undeveloped open space hills through grassland with scattered shrubs and oak trees along a paved path.
They were told to take ten photographs of “whatever captured their attention” to disguise the study’s hypotheses.

Kevin Hahn

Remaining participants walked alone without music down a busy, paved six-lane road with traffic for the same time period.

Following the walks, volunteers again rated their likelihood to repeatedly think negative thoughts.
They also completed a brain scan and cognitive and emotional assessment instruments including:

Lee Anna Clark

–Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) developed by Southern Methodist University’s David Watson, with Lee Anna Clark and Auke Tellegen of University of Minnesota,

–Backward digit span, developed by David Wechsler of Bellevue Hospital,

Jin Fan

–Attention Network Task (ANT- executive attention subtest), developed by Mount Sinai’s Jin Fan, Bruce D. McCandliss and John Fossella of Cornell, Yale’s Jonathan I. Flombaum and Michael I. Posner of University of Oregon,

–Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire (RRQ) by Ohio State’s Paul Trapnell and Jennifer Campbell, including items like “I often reflect on episodes of my life that I should no longer concern myself with”),

Nash Unsworth

–Operation Span Task (OSPAN) developed by Georgia Tech’s Nash Unsworth, Richard Heitz and and Randall Engle with Josef Schrock o Marysville College,

–State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), developed by University of South Florida’s Charles D. Spielberger,

Visuospatial working memory (change detection), developed by University of Iowa’s Steven J. Luck and Edward K. Vogel,

Stephan Mayer

Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS); developed by Oberlin College’s Stephan Mayer and Cynthia McPherson Frantz, including items measuring:^,
Deborah Cracknell

People who walked in nature reported significantly reduced rumination after the walk, scored higher on a complex working memory span task, were more attentive and cheerful.
In contrast, urban walkers’ rumination scores were the same both before and after exercise.

Sabine Pahl

However, built environments containing living elements can reduce stress and enhance mood: Fish tanks, for example, are often included in physicians’ and dentists’ waiting areas, intended to increase patients’ calmness.

This intuitive design choice was validated by a controlled study of people’s reactions to viewing different amounts of marine life in the UK’s National Marine Aquarium as it was unstocked, partially stocked with 6 fish species, and restocked with 19 fish species and 3 invertebrate species.

Matthew White

As the number of fish increased, volunteers:
–Spent longer in spontaneous viewing,
-Showed greater reductions in heart rate including after a rest period, and
-Reported increased mood, according to Plymouth University’s Deborah Cracknell and Sabine Pahl with Mathew P. White and Michael H. Depledge of University of Exeter, collaborating with California Academy of Sciences’s Wallace J. Nichols.

Michael Depledge

Valerie Gladwell

Even viewing photographic images and videos of natural scenery has been shown to reduce skin conductance, heart rate, and other physiological indicators of stress , found University of Essex’s Valerie Gladwell, D.K.Brown, J.L.Barton, M.P.Tarvainen, P.Kuoppa, J.Pretty, J.M.Suddaby, and G.R.H.Sandercock.

These findings suggest that taking time in nature can be an essential self-care practice for people living in urban environments.
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Rx to Reduce Cardiovascular Risk: Listen to Music

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Charalambos Vlachopoulos

Listening to music, both classical and rock, decreases aortic stiffness and wave reflection to reduce cardiovascular risk of death and disability, according to Athens Medical School’s Charalambos Vlachopoulos with Angelos Aggelakas, Nikolaos Ioakeimidis, Panagiotis Xaplanteris, Dimitrios Terentes-Printzios, Mahmoud Abdelrasoul, George Lazaros, and Dimitris Tousoulis.

Panagiotis Xaplanteris

Even “a brief period of mental stress can have an enduring effect on arterial stiffness,” Vlachopoulos and colleagues noted, suggesting the value of music listening as a health intervention to decrease stress and cardiovascular risk.

Dimitris Tousoulis

The team compared aortic stiffness and carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (PWV) reflections for 20 healthy volunteers after a half-hour rest period.
Then, participants were divided into three groups that listened to a half-hour of:

Classical music including excerpts from J.S. Bach’s Orchestral Suites OR
Rock featuring selections by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Green Day OR
Silence.

Cardiovascular measurements were recorded immediately after the different auditory conditions, and then again after 30 minutes.

Liisa Ukkola-Vuoti

Participants who listened to either musical genre had lower aortic stiffness immediately after the music, and wave reflection was reduced for at least 30 minutes after the music.
This effect was even greater for those who preferred classical music, whether they listened to rock or classical selections.

Chakravarthi Kanduri

Music’s “whole body experience” begins with genes: Musical receptivity, perception, and creativity were linked to gene clusters and duplicate DNA associated with the brain’s serotonin systems in research by University of Helsinki’s Liisa Ukkola-Vuoti, Chakravarthi Kanduri, Jaana Oikkonen, Gemma Buck, Pirre Raijas, Kai Karma, and Irma Järvelä, collaborating with Christine Blancher of Oxford Genomics Centre and Aalto University’s Harri Lähdesmäki.

Jaana Oikkonen

They found that neurotransmitter systems enable brain plasticity and connectivity in the brain’s posterior cingulate cortex.

Yi Ting Tan

Several chromosomes contain specific areas associated with musical perception, found University of Melbourne’s Yi Ting Tan, Gary McPherson, Samuel Berkovic, and Sarah Wilson, collaborating with Isabelle Peretz from University of Montreal.

Isabelle Peretz

They detected several locations on chromosome 4 tied to music perception and singing, and a specific area on chromosome 8q is implicated in music perception and absolute pitch.
In addition chromosome 12q’s gene AVPR1A was linked to music perception, music memory, and music listening, whereas SLC6A4 on chromosome 17q was associated with music memory.

These findings suggest music listening can be an easy, enjoyable way to enhance arterial function and cardiovascular health.

-*What physical effects do you notice when listening to your preferred musical genre?

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Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

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