In this column, we provoke fresh thinking and round up some of the weird, wonderful, quirky, surprising – and shocking – stories out there
Wellbeing, warmth and videogames
Snuggling in front of a roaring log fire or feeling the sunshine on our face certainly has the feel-good factor for many of us, and now research suggests why.
Physical warmth can make us feel safer, reducing or even eliminating our fight/flight response, in the same way being around someone we’re close to can, suggests research led by Erica Hornstein at UCLA in America. Just as our brains treat being in the presence of someone we’re close to as a powerful “safety” signal, so too does physical warmth, according to the research published in Emotion, prompted by research finding that we implicitly associate physical warmth with social support.
Given some of the shared behavioural and neural consequences of both social support and physical warmth, as well as the importance of physical warmth for mammalian survival, the researchers conducted a series of examinations designed to examine whether physical warmth is also a prepared safety stimulus. Findings from two studies conducted in human adults showed that physical warmth not only inhibited the fear response but that this lasted even after the warm stimulus was removed.
Meanwhile, concerns that spending lots of time playing videogames has a negative impact on mental health may be unfounded, suggest findings from a massive longitudinal study by Matti Vuorre and colleagues at the University of Oxford, in collaboration with large game publishers such as Nintendo and Square Enix. For the study, the team recruited 38,935 players of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Apex Legends, Eve Online, Forza, Gran Turismo, Outriders, and The Crew 2. Participants were asked to respond to three ‘waves’ of a survey over six weeks, measuring wellbeing and motivation. The data suggests that time spent playing these games had little to no apparent causal effect on wellbeing or life satisfaction.
Read the studies:
Physical warmth: https://bit.ly/3ebQPcf
Videogames: https://psyarxiv.com/8cxyh (this paper hasn’t yet been subjected to peer review)
Cis women no moodier than men
Historically, cisgender women have been the butt of sexist jokes and excluded from research due to assumptions about them being moodier, more volatile and more likely to experience rapid emotion changes because of hormonal fluctuations.
Building on research exploring hormonal fluctuations in rodents, a team from the University of Michigan has found no difference in emotional variance between human cisgender men and women, or between women who do and do not use oral contraception. The research published in Scientific Reports was carried out among cisgender men and women aged between 18 and 38 – some taking the contraceptive pill, some not.
The 75-day study looked how volatile each participant’s mood was, based on how much it varied from their average mood; their emotional inertia, or how much their mood on one day predicted the mood the following day; and how cyclical their moods were, based on how frequently they experienced specific changes in mood. The study involved participants rating at the end of each day how much they had experienced ten positive and ten negative emotions in the last day.
The researchers suggest that if cisgender women’s moods aren’t unstable, there could be many more opportunities for researchers who may have previously excluded these people.
- Read the study: https://go.nature.com/3Ja2pTG
Are you my frenemy?
Coaching is often about clients’ relationships with work colleagues. Sometimes, clients experience both strong positive and negative feelings arising from these relationships.
The workplace is fertile territory for what a study calls “ambivalent relationships” or ‘frenemies,’ suggests research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
Shimul Melwani at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Naomi Rothman at Lehigh University ran a series of studies to find out how frenemies behave with each other. Findings included that ‘frenemies’ both helped and harmed each other, and were less likely to deliver negative feedback to frenemies than to those they felt solely negative towards. And while they were more likely to “covertly” harm frenemies (through spreading rumours, for example) than they would with those they felt positively about, they also helped frenemies more than those they didn’t like.
Though ambivalent relationships involve high levels of negativity (as well as positivity), “they are much more beneficial compared to negative relationships,” say the researchers. Although managers could struggle to turn negative relationships into positive ones, positivity-focused exercises, such as trust-building interactions, could shift relationships characterised by thorough dislike to ‘frenemy’ status, bringing benefits for all.
- Read the study: https://bit.ly/33D1F9a
- Contributions to this slot are welcome.
Email: liz@coaching-at-work.com