̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Yale ̽��ֱ��

Women are ‘running with leaded shoes’ when promoted at work, says study

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 07:13:24 +0000

Women and men feel different at work, as moving up the ranks alleviates negative feelings such as frustration less for women than for men, says a sweeping new study on gender differences in emotion at work.

̽��ֱ��study, led by researchers at Yale ̽��ֱ�� and co-authored by Jochen Menges at Cambridge Judge Business School, finds that rank is associated with greater emotional benefits for men than for women, and that women reported greater negative feelings than men across all ranks.

Because emotions are important for leadership, this puts women at a disadvantage akin to running with ‘leaded shoes’, according to the study, which is based on nearly 15,000 workers in the US.

̽��ֱ��results, published in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, tie the different ways women and men experience emotions at work to underrepresentation at every level of workplace leadership.

Little previous research on gender and workplace emotions

̽��ֱ��study notes that, while the glass ceiling for women has been extensively documented, there has been surprisingly little research on gender differences in emotions at work. Understanding this is particularly important as emotions influence job performance, decision-making, creativity, absence, conflict resolution and leadership effectiveness.

̽��ֱ��practical implications of the study are that organisations must provide support to women as they advance, including formal mentoring relationships and networking groups that can provide opportunities to deal with emotions effectively while supporting women as they rise within organisational ranks.

“It would be hard for anyone to break through a glass ceiling when they feel overwhelmed, stressed, less respected and less confident,” said Menges, who teaches at both the ̽��ֱ�� of Zurich and Cambridge Judge Business School.

“This emotional burden may not only hamper promotion opportunities for women, but also prevent them from contributing to an organisation to the best of their ability. More needs to be done to level the playing field when it comes to emotional burdens at work,” said Menges, whose research often focuses on leadership, motivation and other workplace issues.

Women feel more ‘overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated’ at work

̽��ֱ��study finds gender does make a difference for the emotions that employees experience at work. Compared to men, women reported feeling more overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated, tense, and discouraged, and less respected and confident.

Women reported greater negative feelings than men across all ranks. Although these feelings decreased for both men and women as they moved up in rank, the extent to which rank diminished negative feelings differed between the sexes. For instance, moving up rank did alleviate frustration and discouragement in both men and women, but it did so more for men than for women.

̽��ֱ��study says that because women experience more negative and fewer positive feelings in climbing the organisational ladder, this puts women at a disadvantage in attaining leadership roles.

At the lowest levels of employment, women reported feeling significantly more respected than men, yet this reverses as people climb within an organisation, resulting in men feeling significantly more respected than women at higher levels.

̽��ֱ��research used data from 14,618 adult US workers (50.7% male, 49.3% female) reflecting a diversity of race, ethnicity and industries, to test the following factors:

--Differences in the emotions that men and women experience at work.

--If gender interacts with rank to predict emotions.

--Whether the association between gender and emotions is mediated by emotional labour demands.

--If this relationship differs as a function of the proportion of women in an industry or organisational rank.

Feelings ranging from ‘inspired’ to ‘stressed’

Emotions were assessed using two different methods. Participants used a sliding scale to indicate how often they had experienced 23 feelings at work in the previous three months. ̽��ֱ��items included ten positive emotions such as “interested”, “proud” and “inspired”, and 13 negative responses including “bored”, “stressed” and “envious”. Participants were also asked to report their typical feelings about work in open-ended responses about how their job had made them feel over the past six months.

In addition, to assess positional power, participants were asked to place themselves on a ladder with ten steps representing where people stand in their organisation.

Inhibiting negative emotion is not the answer

̽��ֱ��study concludes that simply smothering emotion in the workplace isn’t the answer: Inhibiting negative emotions for a prolonged time increases burnout, and negatively impacts performance and personal well-being.

It recognises there are areas of future research which include how gender interacts with other categories of identity, such as race and ethnicity, social class, and sexuality. Women of colour face stronger glass ceiling effects than white women and have to simultaneously navigate bias and discrimination based on their gender and race.

̽��ֱ��authors also suggest further investigation to establish whether women’s negative experiences can impose an emotional glass ceiling because obstacles such as unequal treatment at work causes emotions such as feeling disrespected, which in turn can become an additional barrier to advancement.

Reference:
Christa L. Taylor et al. ‘Gender and Emotions at Work: Organizational Rank Has Greater Emotional Benefits for Men than Women.’ Sex Roles (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s11199-021-01256-z

Adapted from a story on the Cambridge Judge Business School website.

Promotion at work has greater emotional benefit for men than women, says a new study on gender and workplace emotion.

Maskot

Colleagues sitting at conference table

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Tree-dwelling mammals survived after asteroid strike destroyed forests

cmm201 — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 12:10:32 +0000

Overall, the study supports the hypothesis that the widespread destruction of forests following the asteroid’s impact favoured ground-dwelling mammals over their arboreal counterparts. However, it also provides strong evidence that some tree-dwelling animals also survived the cataclysm, possibly nesting in branches through the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event.

“ ̽��ֱ��recovery of terrestrial vertebrate life following the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact was one of the most important events in the history of life on Earth,” said senior author Dr Daniel Field, from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “In this study, we drew on our previous work at Cambridge to investigate whether there were similarities in the ecological attributes of avian and mammalian survivors of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.”

̽��ֱ��K-Pg mass extinction event occurred when a meteor slammed into Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period. ̽��ֱ��impact and its aftereffects killed roughly 75% of the animal and plant species on the planet, including whole groups like the non-avian dinosaurs.

For the study, the researchers analysed patterns of substrate preferences among all modern mammals and their ancestors, working backwards from the present day to before the K-Pg extinction event by tracing these traits along numerous phylogenetic trees — diagrams that illustrate the evolutionary relationships among species.

“Our study takes advantage of an ongoing revolution in our understanding of the tree of life, only made possible by researchers working in association with natural history collections,” said co-lead author Jacob Berv, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Michigan, USA. “By integrating data from such collections with modern statistical techniques, we can address new questions about major transitions in evolutionary history.”

̽��ֱ��researchers classified each mammalian species as arboreal, non-arboreal, or semi-arboreal. To be considered arboreal, the species had to nearly always nest in trees. Categorising some species could be tricky. For example, many bat species spend a lot of time among trees but nest in caves, so bats were mostly categorised as non-arboreal or semi-arboreal.

“We were able to see that leading up to the K-Pg event, there was a spike in transitions from arboreal and semi-arboreal to non-arboreal habitat use across our models,” said co-lead author Jonathan Hughes, from Cornell ̽��ֱ��, USA.

̽��ֱ��work builds on a previous study led by Field, which used the same analytical method — known as ancestral state reconstruction — to show that all modern birds evolved from ground-dwelling ancestors after the asteroid strike.

“ ̽��ֱ��fossil record of many vertebrate groups is sparse in the immediate aftermath of the extinction,” said Field, who is also curator of ornithology at the Cambridge Museum of Zoology. “Analytical approaches like ancestral state reconstruction allow us to establish hypotheses for how groups like birds and mammals made it through this cataclysm, which palaeontologists can then test when additional fossils are found.”

̽��ֱ��analysis helps illuminate ecological selectivity of mammals across the K-Pg boundary despite the relatively sparse fossil record of mammalian skeletal elements from the periods immediately preceding and following the asteroid’s impact.

How the tree-dwelling ancestors of primates survived the asteroid’s destruction is unclear. According to the authors, it’s possible that some forest fragments survived the calamity or that early primates and their relatives were ecologically flexible enough to modify their substrate preferences in a world mostly denuded of trees.

Reference:
Jonathan J Hughes et al. ‘Ecological selectivity and the evolution of mammalian substrate preference across the K–Pg boundary.’ Ecology and Evolution (2021). DOI: 10.1002/ece3.8114

Adapted from a Yale news release.

An asteroid strike 66 million years ago wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and devastated the Earth’s forests, but tree-dwelling ancestors of primates may have survived it, according to a new study published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

̽��ֱ��recovery of terrestrial vertebrate life following the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact was one of the most important events in the history of life on Earth

Daniel Field

Rod Waddington

Chimpanzee, Uganda

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Many highly-engaged employees suffer from burnout

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:01 +0000

Whereas lack of engagement is commonly seen as leading to employee turnover due to boredom and disaffection, the study finds that companies, in fact, risk losing some of their most motivated and hard-working employees due to high stress and burnout – a symptom of the “darker side” of workplace engagement.

It is concerning, concludes the study by academics working in the UK, US and Germany, that many engaged employees suffer from stress and burnout symptoms, which may be the beginning of a pathway leading into disengagement.

“Nearly half of all employees were moderately to highly engaged in their work but also exhausted and ready to leave their organisations,” said co-author Dr Jochen Menges from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. “This should give managers a lot to think about.”

̽��ֱ��study, published in the journal Career Development International, examined multiple workplace factors that divide employees into various engagement-burnout profiles. These include low engagement-low burnout (“apathetic”), low engagement-high burnout (“burned-out”), high engagement-low burnout (“engaged”), “moderately engaged-exhausted”; and “highly engaged-exhausted”.

While the largest population at 41 percent fit the healthily “engaged” profile, 19 percent experienced high levels of both engagement and burnout (“highly engaged-exhausted”) and another 35.5 percent were “moderately engaged-exhausted”.

̽��ֱ��highest turnover intentions were reported by the “highly engaged-exhausted” group – higher than even the unengaged group that might be commonly expected to be eyeing an exit.

“These findings are a big challenge to organisations and their management,” said Menges, who is a Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at Cambridge Judge Business School. “By shedding light on some of the factors in both engagement and burnout, the study can help organisations identify workers who are motivated but also at risk of burning out and leaving.”

While previous studies had looked at engagement-burnout profiles, the new study – conducted at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, in collaboration with the Faas Foundation – also focuses on demands placed on employees and resources provided to them in the workplace, and how these affect engagement and burnout.

̽��ֱ��study is based on an online survey of 1,085 employees in all 50 US states. It measured engagement, burnout, demands and resources on a six-point scale ranging from such responses as “never” to “almost always” or “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”.

For engagement, questions included “I strive as hard as I can to complete my job” and “I feel energetic at my job”. For burnout, participants were asked how often at work they feel “disappointed with people” or “physically weak/sickly”. Demand questions included “I have too much work to do”, while resources were measured by questions such as “my supervisor provides me with the support I need to do my job well”.

̽��ֱ��researchers then examined overlap of these various factors, and how they interact and influence each other, in order to draw conclusions about the different profile groups.

“High engagement levels in the workplace can be a double-edged sword for some employees,” said Menges. “Engagement is very beneficial to workers and organisations when burnout symptoms are low, but engagement coupled with high burnout symptoms can lead to undesired outcomes including increased intentions to leave an organisation. So managers need to look carefully at high levels of engagement and help those employees who may be headed for burnout, or they risk higher turnover levels and other undesirable outcomes.”

Reference:
Julia Moeller et al. ‘Highly engaged but burned out: intra-individual profiles in the US workforce.’ Career Development International (2018). DOI: 10.1108/CDI-12-2016-0215

Underlining the danger of job burnout, a new study of more than 1,000 US workers finds that many employees who are highly engaged in their work are also exhausted and ready to leave their organisations.

These findings are a big challenge to organisations and their management.

Jochen Menges

Glenn Carstens-Peters

Keyboard warrior

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'Psychological vaccine’ could help immunise public against ‘fake news’ on climate change – study

fpjl2 — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 09:20:39 +0000

In medicine, vaccinating against a virus involves exposing a body to a weakened version of the threat, enough to build a tolerance.

Social psychologists believe that a similar logic can be applied to help “inoculate” the public against misinformation, including the damaging influence of ‘fake news’ websites propagating myths about climate change.

A new study compared reactions to a well-known climate change fact with those to a popular misinformation campaign. When presented consecutively, the false material completely cancelled out the accurate statement in people’s minds – opinions ended up back where they started.

Researchers then added a small dose of misinformation to delivery of the climate change fact, by briefly introducing people to distortion tactics used by certain groups. This “inoculation” helped shift and hold opinions closer to the truth, despite the follow-up exposure to ‘fake news’.

̽��ֱ��study on US attitudes found the inoculation technique shifted the climate change opinions of Republicans, Independents and Democrats alike.

Published in the journal Global Challenges, the study was conducted by researchers from the universities of Cambridge, UK, Yale and George Mason, US. It is one of the first on ‘inoculation theory’ to try and replicate a ‘real world’ scenario of conflicting information on a highly politicised subject.

“Misinformation can be sticky, spreading and replicating like a virus,” says lead author Dr Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab.

“We wanted to see if we could find a ‘vaccine’ by pre-emptively exposing people to a small amount of the type of misinformation they might experience. A warning that helps preserve the facts.

“ ̽��ֱ��idea is to provide a cognitive repertoire that helps build up resistance to misinformation, so the next time people come across it they are less susceptible.”

Fact vs. Falsehood

To find the most compelling climate change falsehood currently influencing public opinion, van der Linden and colleagues tested popular statements from corners of the internet on a nationally representative sample of US citizens, with each one rated for familiarity and persuasiveness.

̽��ֱ��winner: the assertion that there is no consensus among scientists, apparently supported by the Oregon Global Warming Petition Project. This website claims to hold a petition signed by “over 31,000 American scientists” stating there is no evidence that human CO2 release will cause climate change.

̽��ֱ��study also used the accurate statement that “97% of scientists agree on manmade climate change”. Prior work by van der Linden has shown this fact about scientific consensus is an effective ‘gateway’ for public acceptance of climate change.

In a disguised experiment, researchers tested the opposing statements on over 2,000 participants across the US spectrum of age, education, gender and politics using the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk.

In order to gauge shifts in opinion, each participant was asked to estimate current levels of scientific agreement on climate change throughout the study.

Those shown only the fact about climate change consensus (in pie chart form) reported a large increase in perceived scientific agreement – an average of 20 percentage points. Those shown only misinformation (a screenshot of the Oregon petition website) dropped their belief in a scientific consensus by 9 percentage points.

Some participants were shown the accurate pie chart followed by the erroneous Oregon petition. ̽��ֱ��researchers were surprised to find the two neutralised each other (a tiny difference of 0.5 percentage points).

“It’s uncomfortable to think that misinformation is so potent in our society,” says van der Linden. “A lot of people’s attitudes toward climate change aren’t very firm. They are aware there is a debate going on, but aren’t necessarily sure what to believe. Conflicting messages can leave them feeling back at square one.”

Psychological 'inoculation'

Alongside the consensus fact, two groups in the study were randomly given ‘vaccines’:

A general inoculation, consisting of a warning that “some politically-motivated groups use misleading tactics to try and convince the public that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists”.
A detailed inoculation that picks apart the Oregon petition specifically. For example, by highlighting some of the signatories are fraudulent, such as Charles Darwin and members of the Spice Girls, and less than 1% of signatories have backgrounds in climate science.

For those ‘inoculated’ with this extra data, the misinformation that followed did not cancel out the accurate message.

̽��ֱ��general inoculation saw an average opinion shift of 6.5 percentage points towards acceptance of the climate science consensus, despite exposure to fake news.

When the detailed inoculation was added to the general, it was almost 13 percentage points – two-thirds of the effect seen when participants were just given the consensus fact.

̽��ֱ��research team point out that tobacco and fossil fuel companies have used psychological inoculation in the past to sow seeds of doubt, and to undermine scientific consensus in the public consciousness.

They say the latest study demonstrates that such techniques can be partially “reversed” to promote scientific consensus, and work in favour of the public good.

̽��ֱ��researchers also analysed the results in terms of political parties. Before inoculation, the fake negated the factual for both Democrats and Independents. For Republicans, the fake actually overrode the facts by 9 percentage points.

However, following inoculation, the positive effects of the accurate information were preserved across all parties to match the average findings (around a third with just general inoculation; two-thirds with detailed).

“We found that inoculation messages were equally effective in shifting the opinions of Republicans, Independents and Democrats in a direction consistent with the conclusions of climate science,” says van der Linden.

“What’s striking is that, on average, we found no backfire effect to inoculation messages among groups predisposed to reject climate science, they didn’t seem to retreat into conspiracy theories.

“There will always be people completely resistant to change, but we tend to find there is room for most people to change their minds, even just a little.”

New research finds that misinformation on climate change can psychologically cancel out the influence of accurate statements. However, if legitimate facts are delivered with an “inoculation” – a warning dose of misinformation – some of the positive influence is preserved.

There will always be people completely resistant to change, but we tend to find there is room for most people to change their minds, even just a little

Sander van der Linden

Takver

Victorians rally for No New Coal projects

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First evidence of ‘ghost particles’

sc604 — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 16:55:43 +0000

An international team of scientists at the MicroBooNE physics experiment in the US, including researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, detected their first neutrino candidates, which are also known as 'ghost particles'. It represents a milestone for the project, involving years of hard work and a 40-foot-long particle detector that is filled with 170 tons of liquid argon.

Neutrinos are subatomic, almost weightless particles that only interact via gravity or nuclear decay. Because they don’t interact with light, they can’t be seen. Neutrinos carry no electric charge and travel through the universe almost entirely unaffected by natural forces. They are considered a fundamental building block of matter. ̽��ֱ��2015 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for neutrino oscillations, a phenomenon that is of great important to the field of elementary particle physics.

“It’s nine years since we proposed, designed, built, assembled and commissioned this experiment,” said Bonnie Fleming, MicroBooNE co-spokesperson and a professor of physics at Yale ̽��ֱ��. “That kind of investment makes seeing first neutrinos incredible.”

Following a 13-week shutdown for maintenance, Fermilab’s accelerator complex near Chicago delivered a proton beam on Thursday, which is used to make the neutrinos, to the laboratory’s experiments. After the beam was turned on, scientists analysed the data recorded by MicroBooNE’s particle detector to find evidence of its first neutrino interactions.

Scientists at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have been working on advanced image reconstruction techniques that contributed to the ability to identify the rare neutrino interactions in the MicroBooNE data.

̽��ֱ��MicroBooNE experiment aims to study how neutrinos interact and change within a distance of 500 meters. ̽��ֱ��detector will help scientists reconstruct the results of neutrino collisions as finely detailed, three-dimensional images. MicroBooNE findings also will be relevant for the forthcoming Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), which will examine neutrino transitions over longer distances.

“Future neutrino experiments will use this technology,” said Sam Zeller, Fermilab physicist and MicroBooNE co-spokesperson. “We’re learning a lot from this detector. It’s important not just for us, but for the whole physics community.”

“This is an important step towards the much larger Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE)”, said Professor Mark Thomson of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, co-spokesperson of the DUNE collaboration and member of MicroBooNE. “It is the first time that fully automated pattern recognition software has been used to identify neutrino interactions from the complex images in a detector such as MicroBooNE and the proposed DUNE detector.”

Adapted from a Fermilab press release.

Major international collaboration has seen its first neutrinos – so-called ‘ghost particles’ – in the experiment’s newly built detector.

This is an important step towards the much larger Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE)

Mark Thomson

MicroBooNE

A neutrino event candidate in the MicroBooNE detector

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