Performance Psychology
Can Job Interviews Uncover Narcissism?
Woe be to the employer who hires a promising applicant only to discover that they are an exceptional narcissist. The employer isn’t the only one to suffer, either. For example, if the newly hired narcissist turns out to be a doctor, that’s bad news for patients as well. This latter scenario was the inspiration for…
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4 Steps to Prevent Burnout
Burnout at work is a common phenomenon, but it’s still one that mental health professionals don’t completely understand. Why do some people eventually become emotionally exhausted by their jobs? And is this a workplace problem or a mental health problem? Psychologists don’t even agree on whether burnout is the same as depression, or whether it’s…
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Why Trying to Find Your Passion Might Backfire
Find your passion. It seems like such self-evidently good life advice. But it’s worth stopping to think about what it means to “find” your passion. The implication behind this phrase is that your passion already exists somewhere, and you just have to uncover it. What if passion is something that develops over time, though? What…
Read MoreWhat Weekend Exercise Means for Monday Morning
People choose to spend their precious weekend hours in different ways. Sometimes taking it easy and recharging your batteries is just what you need to start the next week off fresh. Other times, you might find that planning a physically active weekend is the antidote to stress. Why is it that weekend exercise can boost…
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The Personality of a Team Player
If you’re looking for someone who is good at teamwork, your ideal candidate is probably extraverted, agreeable and conscientious – but not too extraverted, agreeable or conscientious, according to a new study. The study was, fittingly, a collaboration between researchers in Romania, the Netherlands and Singapore. In it, the researchers examined the personality traits associated…
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Making Workplaces Less Sedentary
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a study where people were asked to stand up during work meetings. The results of the study suggested that one factor contributing to the unhealthy amount of time people often spend sitting at work is the social expectation that everyone should sit in certain situations, like meetings. So…
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Male Attractiveness: Is It All in the Upper Body?
It’s one thing to judge someone’s attractiveness based only on their looks, without considering their personality or non-physical traits. But researchers from Australia and the United States went a step further: they took people’s faces out of the equation too. In a study published this month, they created what could best be described as Tinder…
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