Br ief IN
Snapshots of some of the latest peer-reviewed
research within psychology and related fields.
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n When helping strangers, atheists are
more motivated by compassion than
religious people, according to a study
by University of California, Berkeley,
researchers. In one of the study’s three
experiments, more than 200 college
students reported how compassionate
they felt. Then they played “economic
trust games” in which they were given
money to share — or not — with a
stranger. Participants who scored low
on the religiosity scale and high on
momentary compassion were more
inclined to share their winnings with
strangers than other study participants.
(Social Psychological and Personality
Science, online April 26)
Workers who took a five-day vacation from email had more natural heart rates and
reported feeling less stress, a study finds.
n Taking an email vacation while on
the job can boost job productivity
and reduce stress, suggests research by
scientists at the University of California,
Irvine, and the U.S. Army, presented
at a meeting of the Association for
Computing Machinery in May. In
the study, 13 information technology
workers agreed to ignore work emails
for five days. Researchers found that
the co-workers who continued reading
emails had more constant elevated heart
rates, while the “vacationers” had more
natural, variable heart rates. The email
vacationers also reported feeling less
stress and being better able to do their
jobs and stay on task.
n A supportive supervisor can
prevent absenteeism among
employees with hazardous jobs,
according to research led by scientists
at Israel’s University of Haifa and the
Netherlands’s Tilburg University. In the
study of 508 transportation workers,
researchers asked participants about
job hazards, their co-workers’ views
on “justifiable” absences, and their
supervisors’ supportiveness, assistance
and encouragement regarding work-
related problems. Peer pressure and
relatively safe jobs did little to encourage
employees to come into work, but
having a supportive supervisor did.
(Journal of Applied Psychology, online
March 5)
n Anxiety increases cancer severity
in mice, according to a study led
by Stanford University researchers.
Scientists exposed hairless mice to
ultraviolet rays for 10-minute bouts
three times a week for 10 weeks —
exposure similar to that of humans who
spend too much time in the sun. After
several months, all the mice developed
skin cancer, but the nervous ones —
those with a proclivity for reticence and
risk aversion, as determined by previous
behavioral tests — had more tumors
than the calmer mice and were the only
ones to develop invasive forms of cancer.
(PLoS ONE, online April 25)
n Depressed mothers are more likely
to needlessly wake their babies at night
than non-depressed moms, according
to researchers at Pennsylvania State
University. The researchers collected
data over seven days on 45 babies,
age 1 month to 2 years, and their
parents. At the start of the week, the
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MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY • JULY/AUGUST 2012
