Some of us experience bigger 'emotional hangovers', whether from fun activities or hurricanes

While some of us may be generally happier than others, all of us experience different emotions from day to day. A fascinating new study suggests that these fluctuations are due to two factors: a cycling of emotion levels across the working week, and our unique personal sensitivity to both good and bad daily events. The study even has hurricanes.

Daniel J. Beal and Louma Ghandour from Rice University set out to track the daily affect patterns of participants from an IT services company. They were particularly interested in how intrinsic task motivation – how fulfilling the participants found their work that day – influenced emotion or affect. Ten days in, Hurricane Ike struck the region. Recommencing some weeks later, the study also took the chance to examine how this negative one-off event influenced matters.

The 65 participants completed 21 end-of-day surveys (prompted by an email reminder), rating intrinsic task motivation, together with how much they felt emotional states like frustrated, discouraged, happy and proud. As per other recent research, the negative emotions showed a cyclical pattern, peaking at Wednesday with a projected bottoming out on Saturday; positive emotions showed the inverse pattern. There were also individual differences in average scores: some people are generally more frustrated than others.

The authors also calculated each participant’s ‘affect spin’, a measure of day-to-day emotional volatility, a high score meaning that person experienced a wide range of different affect states from day to day. The authors found that having a motivating day's work affected that day’s positive mood for everyone, but individuals with high affect spin saw a kind of positive hangover into the next day as well.

After Hurricane Ike, everyone experienced lower levels of positive affect. This began to recover as the event receded into the past, but not for those with high affect spin, who seemed to be suffering a longer hangover again, but this time with negative consequences.

Individual differences in emotional state matter, and this study reminds us that we don't just differ on average, but also in how dynamically our mood responds to events. It's possible that offering a fascinating problem to your reactive employee on a Monday will generate benefits that carry forward, and battle the mid-week dip. The authors conclude that “mapping the terrain of positive and negative affective events and their implications for worker well-being can help to ground the field of organizational psychology in a truly experiential understanding of work life.”

Beal, D., & Ghandour, L. (2011). Stability, change, and the stability of change in daily workplace affect Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32 (4), 526-546 DOI: 10.1002/job.713

Buying into the idea of 'free choice' makes us less likely to see discrimination

Illustration: Emily Wilkinson, www.mindfulmaps.com

To all our women readers: it's great to be living in a post-discrimination world, right? Right? Is this thing on?

Whatever your view – and regardless of facts such as woman's earnings standing at under 80% of men's - many people seem to feel that way, such as the 53% of Americans in a recent Gallup poll. Nicole Stephens and Cynthia Levine of Northwestern University identify one reason for this: the 'choice framework', a view of the world particularly popular in the US that treats all actions as freely chosen based on our preferences. Seeing life purely in terms of choices can empower individuals, and studies show we can benefit psychologically. But in a new paper to be published in Psychological Science, these researchers explore how it can make us reluctant to see discrimination as a cause of mothers leaving the workforce.

In a first study, 171 stay-at-home mothers revealed through questionnaire ratings that they saw their departure from the workforces as a choice rather than something imposed on them. The more they endorsed the choice explanation, the less likely they were to interpret genuine gender inequality in a range of industries as due to discrimination or structural challenges to women working (such as a default model of work that doesn't adequately account for childcare).

The second study adopted experimental methods to manipulate exposure to the choice framework. While waiting to begin the experiment, 46 undergraduates were unwittingly exposed to a poster on the wall about “women's experiences in the workforce”; in one condition, the title began with the phrase “Choosing to leave”. Participants then completed a questionnaire, and those who had had this slight level of exposure to the choice framework were somewhat more likely to rate gender discrimination as non-existent.

Stephens and Levine note that culture propagates such messages at higher frequencies than those manipulated in their study, thus the baseline influence might be substantial. The consequences are twofold: although people feel happier when they see themselves as an active agent in their own life, this can turn against them when they meet genuine structural challenges, where it “could undermine their sense of competence or deter them from seeking help”. And on a societal level, this tendency may prevent the correction of genuine inequity. We may need cultural and political actors to reframe the debate. And an individual level, it might be enlightening to reflect once in a while on the limits to choice.

Stephens, Nicole, & Levine, Cynthia (2011). Opting Out or Denying Discrimination? How the Framework of Free Choice in American Society Influences Perceptions of Gender Equality Psychological Science

Social networks of extraverts are bigger but no more intimate

Do extraverts have more numerous and deeper social relationships? Organisations are increasingly interested in social capital, the networks accessed through individuals, so this is no idle question. Thomas Pollet from the University of Groningen, investigated this with University of Oxford collaborators Sam Roberts and Robin Dunbar, and their answer is yes, and no.

Recognising that our relationships aren't monolithic, the researchers treated social networks as a set of three layers. The inner support group contains those people (typically around five) that you would turn to in a crisis. Around this are a further ten-odd people, a sympathy group who would be deeply affected by your death. Finally there is an outer layer of more variable size, containing people connected to you by weak ties.

Pollet recruited 117 Dutch adults, who were asked to list their family, friends and acquaintances, and for each one, state the recency of communication and how emotionally close they were. Each network was grouped into layers, the innermost comprising those with past-week contact and over seven out of ten on the emotion measure; the sympathy layer those with past-month contact; and the outer layer receiving the rest. Each participant also completed a measure of extraversion.

The researchers found extraverts had more people in every layer – more weak ties, but also more individuals they contacted frequently. Although larger social networks have been reported before, this study finds the effect after controlling for age, a potential confound in other studies. However, extraversion didn't affect emotional closeness to their network: weak ties with occasional contacts don't appear stronger in extraverts.

The authors scrutinised every layer of the network, finding this same lack of effect throughout, but I'm cautious about interpretation at the inner layers, given that the emotional closeness score is both the variable of interest and the criteria used to determine membership. On my understanding, if introverts had a support group of contacts that they met frequently but gave low emotional closeness scores - fives or sixes - the methodology would never identify this.

It's worth noting the data suggests that regardless of extraversion, it's somewhat harder to keep close to all the members of a very large outer layer, which suggests a practical constraint that extraverts may be more liable to hit up against.

This study suggests extraverts have larger networks that are not simply populated by weak ties, but contain larger sets of close relationships. An organisation trying to tap into its social capital might start by talking to its most extraverted members. However, they shouldn't forget that introverts have equally deep relationships, nor that valuable networks contain the right people, not the most.

Pollet, T., Roberts, S., & Dunbar, R. (2011). Extraverts Have Larger Social Network Layers Journal of Individual Differences, 32 (3), 161-169 DOI: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000048

Continually juggling stakeholders can lead to doubting the value of your mission

If your work has taken you into meetings with a partnering company, a cross-institutional committee, or any situation working together with another organisation, you've taken the role of a boundary spanner. Organisations do well out of boundary spanners, who deliver them information about external conditions and increase their reach to broader stakeholders. But Lakshmi Ramarajan and colleagues have demonstrated that there are costs for the boundary spanner, particularly in challenging, multi-party situations.

Social psychology suggests that contact across group boundaries is problematic outside of ideal circumstances. Disparate goals may fuel conflict; unfamiliar patterns of behaviour can be hard to adjust to; outside perspective may cast your own organisation in an unfavourable light. To investigate this, Ramarajan's team surveyed 833 Dutch military personnel, who spent time between 1995 and 1999 engaged in peacekeeping missions. Such missions occur against a backdrop of heavy conflict, and are made more problematic by status and resource differences between the peacekeepers and their non-military counterparts: NGO's, governmental bodies and local authorities.

Each participant detailed their frequency of personal contact with each type of party, and the degree of seriousness of work-specific problems that emerged with that party – a combination of objective severity and their personal involvement. Their responses confirmed that peacekeepers with more frequent contact with other parties had greater experiences of work-specific problems.

Previous research has suggested an inverse relationship between conditions 'home' and 'away', as if a spat with an external partner makes you more grateful for your colleagues. But in the current study, more work-specific problems with other parties led to more negative attitudes towards their own job and doubting the value of their mission. This resembles spillover from one domain to another, due to ruminations or drained psychological resources. The authors attribute the difference to the high demands on peacekeepers, juggling many parties on non-facilitated, difficult issues without the option to walk away, a situation increasingly common for more and more 21st Century organisations.

Boundary spanning activities are certainly useful to the organisation, and can benefit the individual, who tends to be more trusted and gain reputation with other organisations. But we should be concerned with its costs, eroding engagement with the work and faith in the organisation, which are especially likely in complex situations with soft organisational boundaries. As the authors conclude, those in this position may want to weigh these issues up “when thinking about the costs of alliances, joint ventures, or other cooperative mechanisms.”

Ramarajan, L., Bezrukova, K., Jehn, K., & Euwema, M. (2011). From the outside in: The negative spillover effects of boundary spanners' relations with members of other organizations Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32 (6), 886-905 DOI: 10.1002/job.723

Higher education is burning out its employees

It's a tumultuous period for higher education in the UK, with many of the givens of university existence being chipped away. It feels like a good time to take the temperature of those who work in that sector. One indicator is the extent to which employees feel they are burned out – when everyday work activities become a struggle, leaving them weary, fed up and performing less effectively. Jenny Watts and Noelle Robertson at the University of Leicester have reviewed the literature to provide us a current account of burnout in university teaching staff.

Searching research databases using terms such as 'burnout' and 'faculty', Watts and Robertson pruned the results using strict criteria to arrive at just 12 English-language papers that tackled burnout in university staff, mainly dealing with Western institutions alongside papers from Turkey and South Africa. The review suggests levels of burnout in universities are similar to those found in professions like school teachers and hospital workers that are generally recognised as challenging; a far cry from the traditional conception of universities as a home for lower-stress work.

What seems to be driving these levels of burnout? Certain groups are more vulnerable, with younger staff more susceptible, possibly due to less developed coping mechanisms.
Consistent with the general burnout literature work, women were more prone to emotional exhaustion, whereas men were more likely to become depersonalised and distanced from their work.

Burnout was reduced when staff felt that their contact with students was valued, and was higher when staff faced negative student evaluations or direct conflict. However, non-student factors such as intensive time pressure appear to have greater effects, suggesting that the stressors are less about unbearable students than changes in work patterns, which may include mounting bureaucracy and more frequent classes. Several of the papers do indeed suggest that simply being responsible for more students leads to more burnout.

There is some evidence that social support protects individuals from burnout, although this was not found in all studies. Type of teaching also mattered, with teachers of postgraduates more likely to hang on to work satisfaction on the one hand, but on the other experience more exhaustion and distancing.

The authors are clear that this is a worrying picture, especially as university staff are responsible for pastoral care of students; hard to be a sympathetic ear when you can't wait to get out of the building. They call for more research into this area in order to form “strategies to enhance wellbeing, student success and teaching quality, particularly during a time of retrenchment in the university sector.”


Watts, J., & Robertson, N. (2011). Burnout in university teaching staff: a systematic literature review Educational Research, 53 (1), 33-50 DOI: 10.1080/00131881.2011.552235

Creativity dampened by observing anger, but enhanced by sarcasm

Bearing the brunt of someone's anger can focus the mind wonderfully. This can help us to knuckle down on well-defined tasks, but can hinder activities that depend on open, lateral thinking. In the Journal of Applied Psychology, Ella Miron-Spektor and colleagues demonstrate how simply observing an angry outburst in a work context can reproduce these effects. They also explore what happens when angry messages are delivered with a twist of sarcasm.

The researchers ran three studies asking 375 engineering students to imagine being a customer service agent. The primary task, a written problem, was preceded by an observation stage where they listened to a recorded conversation between another service agent and a customer who was either neutral or overtly hostile. Participants in the angry condition performed better at the assessed problem when it was analytic and closed in scope but worse at insight problems requiring lateral thinking and discovery, akin to the classic 'make a functioning wall-mounted light from only a candle, tin tack and box of matches'*.

One of the studies collected ratings of the emotional sense of threat that participants felt, which partly mediated the influence of anger on the two different types of tasks. This suggests that observed anger causes participants to adopt more of a prevention orientation, a state in which you adopt a narrow focus on immediate concerns in the hope of avoiding suffering and gaining security.

Another study added a further condition that presented a recorded exchange that was sarcastic rather than overtly hostile, using withering phrases like “Your service is 'fast as a turtle'”. Participants in this condition actually performed the best on the creative problem. The researchers suspected that the humour of sarcasm makes it less overtly threatening, hence less likely to trigger prevention orientation. This was borne out by the more moderate anger ratings given by participants in the condition.

Additionally, sarcastic comments need to be actively made sense of, as they stand at odds with the true situation, such as giving high praise to mediocrity. Parsing such paradoxes by looking at them in different ways might kick us into a mental gear ready for complex thinking. To examine this, participants worked through the classic Kelly repertory grid technique, in which you repeatedly select trios of people from a list and articulate how one is different from the other two, revealing the range of different dimensions you are able to apply to multifaceted reality. Those exposed to sarcasm generated more dimensions, suggesting they could deal with more cognitive complexity, looking at issues from more than one angle.

In the workplace, measured, appropriate anger may remind people of priorities and provide needed focus. But by sending individuals into fire-fighting mode it's also likely to hamper insight and the chances of recognising deeper issues. Miron-Spektor's team demonstrate that merely observing anger directed at another in a work-relevant exchange can deliver these effects. This means that enforcing demands and directives through anger may generate risk-averse work climates. Yet there is a possible solution: to leaven harder messages with humour. And if you think I'm talking about sarcasm... way to go, reader!

Miron-Spektor, E., Efrat-Treister, D., Rafaeli, A., & Schwarz-Cohen, O. (2011). Others' anger makes people work harder not smarter: The effect of observing anger and sarcasm on creative and analytic thinking. Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0023593

*The trick is to recognise the match box itself, rather than just its contents, can be part of the solution. Pin the match tray to the wall, melt wax off the candle into the tray and use this to firmly affix the candle. Once lit, the stable candle will produce light without creating any dripping mess on the floor.

Why do some boards hang on to compromised directors?

A board of directors is faced with a decision when one of its members becomes associated with shady behaviour at another company: should they safeguard the board's integrity and dismiss the compromised individual? It's not an easy decision to make, weighing up the member's value against the risks of keeping them on - particularly in complex situations like accounting fraud where there isn't a simple transgression but a broader lapse in responsibilities. Why do some boards act quickly to dismiss compromised directors, and others don't?

Amanda Cowen and Jeremy Marcel of the University of Virginia have some answers. They identified 63 companies pressured into issuing a 'downward restatement' – an admission that their finances had been represented as rosier than they actually were. The authors examined the decisions made by other companies who shared a director with one of these 63 companies, finding that a compromised director was on average dismissed from 28% of their other board seats. The impetus had a lot to do with external scrutiny, with companies most willing to dismiss when covered by many external analysts and by government rating agencies.

In addition, Cowen and Marcel found an example of “mid-status conformity”, the social psychological effect that mid-ranked players are most concerned that developing events could define them in the eyes of others, as unlike the top and bottom dogs, people haven't developed fixed ideas of what they are all about. Here the boards that had mid-level social capital - as measured by their total connections to other directors nationwide - were readiest to eject problematic directors.

The authors looked for a second mid-status effect based around human capital, but none was observed. I wonder if this may be the result of using an indirect measure, using facts such as whether the board contained active CEOs, rather than directly measuring genuine capabilities or perceptions within the industry.

We might feel a little cynical about these sets of motivations, but the authors point out that their findings show that “organizational interests shape dismissal decisions”, which is better than simply saving friends and jettisoning less popular individuals. It confirms that boards take their responsibility to shareholders seriously, and this constitutes their ultimate responsibility under corporate law. However, there are dangers in such a hard-nosed cost-benefit approach. “If directors can anticipate colleagues’ reactions to their conduct, such estimations may adversely affect their risk-taking or decision-making behavior. This anticipation may be especially problematic when directors perceive that the consequences of their behaviors are disconnected from the conduct itself and are instead determined by their colleagues’ needs to manage particular external relationships.”

Cowen, Amanda P., & Marcel, Jeremy L. (2011). Damaged Goods: Board Decisions to dismiss reputationally compromised directors Academy of Management Journal, 54 (3), 509-527