Mastodon
News Addiction is Bad for Your Mental (and Physical) Health

News Addiction is Bad for Your Mental (and Physical) Health

by | 2022 Sep 8 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

bad news brain negativity

Many years ago I first heard the advice of “Don’t watch the news if you want to be happy”. The reason is that news is more often than not negative – I have written about this negativity bias previously – as the saying goes in news circles “if it bleeds, it leads”.

So, avoiding this dose of negativity is probably a good thing. However, since I first heard this decades ago the world has changed with access to news ever more present – it is not just on the television, it is on every device that we carry and at every minute throughout the day whether through formal news websites or through social media applications. Now it seems much harder than ever to avoid the negativity of the news.

But is this really negative?

McGaughlin et al. have just published a study which they conducted with 1’100 US adults. The found that about 16.5% had problematic news consumption. This is when the desire to follow the news becomes similar to addiction with constant checking of the news almost 24 hours a day and being pulled into a constant cycle of trying to relieve one’s anxiety by checking the news but then getting further pulled in.
It might seem obvious that this is not a good place to be mentally but is this what they found?

They did indeed. With 73.6% of those with problematic news consumption reported experiencing mental ill-being “quite a bit” or “very much”. This is compared to only 8% of other participants.

But on top of this 61% those with problematic news consumption also reported physical ill-being “quite a bit” or “very much” in comparison to only 6.1% of other participants.

Those are quite dramatic figures and the surprising outcome is that this is correlated so strongly to physical as well as mental well-being.
This shows that that bit of sage advice of avoiding the news seems to be very good advice but more than that avoiding the blackhole of continuous news consumption.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way out of this. 24-hour news consumption is possible and very easy. Maybe a more positive reporting would at least help. I’m not holding my breath and I’ll stick to my general news avoidance strategy (while keeping myself informed).

Quick Hits Alerts
Article Alerts
Newsletter
Premium Brain
Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

twitter / LinkedIn

Reference

Bryan McLaughlin, Melissa R. Gotlieb, Devin J. Mills. 
Caught in a Dangerous World: Problematic News Consumption and Its Relationship to Mental and Physical Ill-Being. 
Health Communication, 2022; 1
DOI: 10.1080/10410236.2022.2106086

More Quick Hits

Fresh Teams are More Effective and More Innovative

Fresh Teams are More Effective and More Innovative

by | 2022 Sep 7 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

team brain innovation

We all know that just about anything in the world is produced by teams. This has never been more true than in scientific disciplines with team dependencies increasing over the years as research topics have become more complex and collaboration in teams is essential (ditch that sole scientific genius stereotype, please).

There has been a lot of work on team collaboration, but one interesting aspect is of freshness of teams. In this context fresh doesn’t mean well slept and recovered – though that would be important also. Here freshness refers to how long teams or the members have worked together and how many members are new or fresh. This has not been researched previously.

Enter Zeng et al. from Bar-Ilann University. They systematically measured the originality and multi-disciplinary impact of scientific teams and their published papers. They then systematically measured the team freshness by measuring how often and how long team members had previously collaborated together.

What they found is that fresher teams created studies with higher originality and greater multidisciplinary impact. This effect was larger in larger teams. This therefore suggest that getting new team members is important for scientific teams – this seems to beat just new collaboration opportunities. What was also surprising, maybe, is that younger teams, those with less experience, increased the originality and diversity impact.

This may go against standard thinking whereby experienced scientists might be considered more beneficial. Likely there is a good balance. But these results show that freshness either in terms of experience and in teams is important for quality of output!

I imagine this could transfer to many teams in business also. Let’s hope that research will come along soon. But for now, if you have a team you might want to consider its freshness if you want original and impactful ideas.

Quick Hits Alerts
Article Alerts
Newsletter
Premium Brain
Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

twitter / LinkedIn

Reference

An Zeng, Ying Fan, Zengru Di, Yougui Wang, Shlomo Havlin. 
Fresh teams are associated with original and multidisciplinary research. 
Nature Human Behaviour, 2021
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01084-x

More Quick Hits

Too Much of a Good Thing – Why Leaders Can be Too Extraverted

Too Much of a Good Thing – Why Leaders Can be Too Extraverted

by | 2022 Sep 6 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

Extraversion is considered a positive trait particularly in leadership. As a leader you will be the centre of attention and need to put yourself out there. So, extraversion must be a good thing, right?

Well, maybe not. In fact, we have in our assessments always said that there is a risk with high levels of anything – the too much of a good thing principle. And some recent research just out has lent support to this.

This research by Hu et al. from Ohio State University conducted two related studies. The first involved 260 business undergraduates who had been randomly assigned to self-managed teams and worked in these teams on various projects over the semester.

Everyone rated themselves on two facets of extraversion, assertiveness but also warmth and friendliness. They also assessed their own prosocial motivation i.e. willingness to help others. Then at the end of the semester everyone rated who they thought was seen as a leader within their group, how much they were liked, and how much they would go to this person for advice or help.

The second study was completed with 337 employees in a large retail company and had similar setup with self-managed teams without formal leaders and the same assessments.

So, you may wonder what the results were.

Well yes, there was a general link between extraversion, leadership and how much these leaders were liked. But only to a limit. There was a sweet spot as we have also seen in our data. Being extraverted is generally positive on either dimension measured – but high levels were then seen as negative. If you are too assertive you will be seen as pushy and aggressive which is not well received. Similarly, if you are overly warm and social this makes some people feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed.

However, excessive extraversion was forgiven if it was seen as being prosocially motivated i.e.. being assertive for somebody else.

So, this goes to show that you can have too much of a good thing – extraversion is generally seen as being positive in leadership scenarios but beware of too much of a good thing. What we also noticed in our assessments was that single dimensions were also not very predictive of effectiveness only when clustered with multiple other traits. So yes, you can fall on the introverted side and still be a good leader.

This research was carried out with informal leaders but as these show personal opinions I assume this would translate to formal leadership positions. Of note also is that in life and in business there are many informal leaders – and this shows that these will certainly fall mostly in that sweet spot.

Quick Hits Alerts
Article Alerts
Newsletter
Premium Brain
Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

twitter / LinkedIn

Reference

Jia Hu, Zhen Zhang, Kaifeng Jiang, Wansi Chen. 
Getting ahead, getting along, and getting prosocial: Examining extraversion facets, peer reactions, and leadership emergence.
Journal of Applied Psychology, 2019
DOI: 10.1037/apl0000413

More Quick Hits

Gene Mutation Leads to Being “Clueless”

Gene Mutation Leads to Being “Clueless”

by | 2022 Sep 5 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

mouse social brain

With such a title there is lots of scope for jokes about bad brains, bad genetics, and stupidity. Most of which are probably unjustified. And one of the things many of us involved at different levels in neuroscience are quick to point out is that the brain is plastic, it grows and learns – throughout life.

Nevertheless, it is important to find out about the underlying mechanisms and the limits to this plasticity.

Researchers at the UT Southwestern Medical Centre have discovered a genetic mutation that impacts memory and learning. Because learning is a complex process it is often nigh on impossible to identify single genes that contribute to this.

For this study the researchers conducted a large-scale mutagenesis screen – that is screened mice with multiple mutations in their genes to try to track down various neurological and behavioural traits. They then managed to identify a mutant mouse with spatial learning defects. They named the mouse Clueless – who said scientists don’t have a sense of humour.

With mice with similar mutations, they noticed that they learned badly in fear-conditioning tests, with reduced freezing, a natural response, and also defects in short-term and long-term memory. They could then map this to a single mutation in the Kcnc3 gene which encodes potassium channels in neurons (I won’t go into that here – quite a specific feature of a neuron which enables electrical impulses).

So fascinating to know that a single gene with quite specific functions can lead to larger scale learning deficits – and good to know this so that researchers can finally get a better grasp on some of these issues. There are likely many reasons for being clueless but one of them appears to be a mutation in the Kcnc3 gene.

No funny jokes about my degrading memory now!

Quick Hits Alerts
Article Alerts
Newsletter
Premium Brain
Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

twitter / LinkedIn

Reference

Pin Xu, Kazuhiro Shimomura, Changhoon Lee, Xiaofei Gao, Eleanor H. Simpson, Guocun Huang, Chryshanthi M. Joseph, Vivek Kumar, Woo-Ping Ge, Karen S. Pawlowski, Mitchell D. Frye, Saïd Kourrich, Eric R. Kandel, Joseph S. Takahashi. 
A missense mutation in Kcnc3 causes hippocampal learning deficits in mice. 
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 119 (31)
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2204901119

 

More Quick Hits

Humble Leaders Make Teams More Effective

Humble Leaders Make Teams More Effective

by | 2022 Sep 2 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

team high performance

The headline is a bit of a sweeping statement, whether that is generally true is open to further research (and is in fact supported by plenty of other research), but that was what was found in this particular context of leaders of collaborative teacher groups.

So, what was this study and how did it show that humility improved performance?

This study was done in China in what are called Teacher Research Groups (TRG). These are what would be called Professional Learning Communities (PLC) in other parts of the world where teachers group up to share their experiences and to guide better learning and improve the quality of teaching. These are led by an experienced educator.

The study by Yun Qu of Ohio State University followed 537 teachers in 238 TRGs in various locations, urban and rural. They rated the group leaders on three dimensions of humility:

  1. Willingness to view themselves accurately (e.g. their knowledge or lack thereof)
  2. Appreciation of others’ strengths
  3. Teachability (i.e. being open to others’ advice).

The data showed that those in groups with leaders who showed the highest humility reported multiple positive results all of which can be directly correlated to higher performance:

  • Reported sharing more knowledge and expertise at TRG meetings
  • Reported higher levels of psychological safety
  • Felt they could take risks and others wouldn’t undermine their efforts
  • Felt more empowered

All these are very positive findings. In the case of the TRGs, this made them more effective and serve their purpose better which is sharing knowledge and expertise, learning, and applying this knowledge and expertise in the classroom.

All of the above are, however, standard themes in standard corporate leadership literature and all have large bodies of evidence behind them to show their effectiveness. In fact, psychological safety is a big theme currently in corporate development.

So, though this was conducted in China in a specific context the findings suggest that this would be transferable to many leadership scenarios because they are eliciting the exact same results that leadership literature does point to and I am sure all businesses would be more than happy to have – and is supported by masses of literature on the subject:

  • Increased sharing of knowledge and expertise
  • Increased psychological safety
  • Higher empowerment

And that is helped by leadership humility – other research has shown that leadership narcissism does the exact opposite.

And just yesterday I was closing a workshop for a team that is world-leading (no exaggeration) in their field. What struck me was that the leadership, on top of being very knowledgable, results-focused, and very experienced in their roles, were also very open, caring, and humble.

They were also explicitly trying to (further) improve the above three points, hence the workshop. They were doing that because they know that will be critical to their results and success.

So, here’s to a healthy dose of humility in leadership!

Quick Hits Alerts
Article Alerts
Newsletter
Premium Brain
Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

twitter / LinkedIn

Reference

Yun Qu, Jinjie Zhu, Roger D. Goddard. 
Modesty brings gains: linking humble leadership to knowledge sharing via psychological safety and psychological empowerment in professional learning communities. 
Educational Studies, 2022; 1
DOI: 10.1080/03055698.2022.2103648

More Quick Hits

Micro Breaks Improve Performance and Wellbeing

Micro Breaks Improve Performance and Wellbeing

by | 2022 Sep 1 | Public, Quick Hits

Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

break brain performanceWe all know that taking breaks is good for our brain and wellbeing – in fact we absolutely need to take breaks. It is just the way our brain and body is designed.

But oftentimes in the workplace this can be challenging – we get stuck into piles of work and our attention is constantly pulled in different directions. We may also feel we do not have the time for a break with work to be done and deadlines looming. I know that feeling well.

Enter the micro-break. The term micro-break has now entered the world of research and refers to short breaks – less than 10 minutes according to many studies but often as short as one minute. The idea is that a micro-break is precisely that, micro, short, and doesn’t interrupt workflow for too long, or can be completed quickly.

Interestingly there is some research to show that we tend to automatically increase our micro-breaks when fatigued. This can be getting a cup of tea/coffee a visit to the toilet, or a simple stretch and look out of the window.

The results into micro-breaks are generally positive but are they consistent? Enter Patricia Albulescu et al. who have just conducted a review of 22 studies from the last 30 years. These included multiple variations of micro-breaks: different work settings, in controlled experiments, different types of breaks, and at different lengths.

The results were interesting – some intuitive and some counterintuitive.

First off, they found that micro-breaks increased vigour and decreased fatigue. That’s a very good thing: higher energy and lower tiredness. Therefore, a clear correlation with improved wellbeing.

However, on first glance the data didn’t show any increase in performance. But on second look they found that there was a link to better performance with creative or clerical tasks and here the longer breaks were more effective. This did not translate to cognitive demanding tasks.

This may seem counterintuitive but shows that a short break from monotony or creative tasks can really help but that demanding cognitive “heavy lifting” type of tasks seem to require more recovery. This is actually logical.

What this therefore shows is that micro-breaks should be a part of a daily work routine for many, if possible. They contribute to increasing energy and reducing fatigue. But be aware that longer breaks are also necessary to reset cognitive functions. Note also that combining this with exercise can be highly beneficial. One of my top tips is take a 3-minute walk every 45 minutes.

This is because light activity, and particularly walking, can also contribute to cognitive function and health – multiple short walks are as beneficial to health as a few longer walks. And that ain’t bad either.

I also wonder how much of this is contribution to the sense of comfort, energy, and motivation with working virtually or work from our home offices. Micro-breaks are easier and more common in the home environment is my intuition and therfore contributes to the comfort (amongst other factors).

But for now, remember that micro-breaks are good for you. So don’t feel guilty about it. Rather make this a fixed part of your workday!

Quick Hits Alerts
Article Alerts
Newsletter
Premium Brain
Andy Habermacher

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

twitter / LinkedIn

Reference

Patricia Albulescu, Irina Macsinga, Andrei Rusu, Coralia Sulea, Alexandra Bodnaru, Bogdan Tudor Tulbure.
‘Give me a break!’ A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks for increasing well-being and performance.
PLOS ONE, 2022; 17 (8): e0272460
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272460

More Quick Hits