23. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From the magnificent ScienceDaily.com…

Your View of Personal Goals Can Affect Your Relationships

ScienceDaily (Nov. 22, 2010) — How you think about your goals — whether it’s to improve yourself or to do better than others — can affect whether you reach those goals. Different kinds of goals can also have distinct effects on your relationships with people around you, according to the authors of a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science.

People with “mastery goals” want to improve themselves. Maybe they want to get better grades, make more sales, or land that triple toe loop.

On the other hand, people with what psychologists call “performance goals” are trying to outperform others — to get a better grade than a friend or be Employee of the Year. Both kinds of goals can be useful in different contexts. But P. Marijn Poortvliet, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Céline Darnon, of France’s Clermont University, are interested in the social context of these goals — what they do to your relationships.

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Poortvliet’s work focuses on information exchange — whether people are open and honest when they are working together. “People with performance goals are more deceitful” and less likely to share information with coworkers, both in the laboratory and in real-world offices he has studied, Poortvliet says. “The reason is fairly obvious — when you want to outperform others, it doesn’t make sense to be honest about information.”

On the other hand, people who are trying to improve themselves are quite open, he says. “If the ultimate goal is to improve yourself, one way to do it is to be very cooperative with other people.” This can help improve the work environment, even though the people with these goals aren’t necessarily thinking about social relations. “They’re not really altruists, per se. They see the social exchange as a means toward the ends of self improvement.” Other research has found that people with these self-improvement goals are more open to hearing different perspectives, while people with a performance goal “would rather just say, ‘I’m just right and you are wrong.’”

It’s not always bad to be competitive, Poortvliet says. “For example, if you want to be the Olympic champion, of course it’s nice to have mastery goals and you should probably have mastery goals, but you definitely need performance goals because you want to be the winner and not the runner-up.”

But it’s important to think about how goals affect the social environment. “If you really want to establish constructive and long-lasting working relationships, then you should really balance the different levels of goals,” Poortvliet says — thinking not only about each person’s achievement, but also about the team as a whole.

Some people are naturally more competitive than others. But it’s also possible for managers to shift the kinds of goals people have by, for example, giving a bonus for the best employee. That might encourage people to set performance goals and compete against each other. On the other hand, it would also be possible to structure a bonus program to give people rewards based on their individual improvement over time.

Original article can be found by clicking here.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Association for Psychological Science.

Journal Reference:
1. P. Marijn Poortvliet and Céline Darnon. Toward a More Social Understanding of Achievement Goals: The Interpersonal Effects of Mastery and Performance Goals. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2010; 19 (5): 324 DOI: 10.1177/0963721410383246

To life, love and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder Guide to Self, Inc.

www.GuideToSelf.com

http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com  Excellent blog on the latest anger management tools

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20. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

Fantastic and uplifting reminder about the unifying power and necessity of compassion in today’s world. Compassion is the antidote to anger.

Have a compassionate weekend!

To life, love and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.
Founder Guide to Self, Inc.
http://www.GuideToSelf.com

Posted in San Francisco Bay Area, Well-being, Self-compassion, Optimal Human Functioning, Executive coach, De-escalating anger, keys to happiness, Stress management, Compassion, Emotion and physical health, Free self-help book, Managing anger, San Ramon CA, Emotion & productivity, Staying calm, Happiness, Emotional IQ, Dr. John Schinnerer, Forgiveness, Guide To Self Beginners Guide To Managing Emotion, Emotional management, Emotion & learning, Danville CA, Altruism, Men's emotions, Anger Management, Positive Psychology | Print | No Comments »

12. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From ScienceDaily…

ScienceDaily (Nov. 10, 2010) — Some scholars estimate that presenteeism, a relatively recent buzzword that applies to people who are less productive at work because of health issues, costs employers as much as three times the dollar amount as absenteeism in terms of lost productivity.

But researchers at University of Michigan believe those numbers may be inaccurate. A new opinion paper suggests that the tools for measuring and quantifying hours of lost productivity and translating those hours to dollars are unreliable and don’t capture the entire presenteeism picture, said Susan Hagen, an analyst from the U-M School of Kinesiology Health Management Research Center (HMRC).

Because of this, the HMRC has suggested a three-year moratorium on its studies of presenteeism that translate hours of productivity loss into financial or dollar equivalents.

The HMRC defines presenteeism as reduced productivity at work due to health conditions such as asthma, back pain, allergies or depression.

“It’s hard to be 100 percent effective every moment you’re at work,” Hagen said. “We’re talking about the lack of productivity that stems from a health condition, or because you’re worried about your health.”

One of the challenges in measuring presenteeism is that all the measurement instruments use self-reported data. This means you’re depending on employees to report they aren’t working as effectively as they could be, due to their health.

“There are all kind of estimates as to how often it happens,” Hagen said. “The estimates can vary so widely. Some studies say that most workers don’t have any presenteeism, while there is other research that suggests most workers experience presenteeism to some degree.”

Another big problem is that there are so many different measuring tools, and each tool may measure presenteeism in a different way. Also, not all health problems affect workers in the same ways. For example, a person may have allergies for two weeks in May and feel horrible, but the measurement instrument could take that two weeks and expand that bad experience to 12 months. This process vastly over-reports the illness and thus, the hours lost and the subsequent financial loss.

“Almost everybody believes in the concept of presenteeism but maybe some of those calculations based on those early measurements aren’t accurate,” Hagen said.

“Our concern is that organizations may be making financial or future decisions based on data that may not support those decisions,” Hagen said.

The paper appears in the November issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

University of Michigan (2010, November 10). Sick at work and surfing the net? You’re not alone — or are you?. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 11, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/2010/11/101109152943.htm

To life, love, health and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder of Guide to Self, Inc.

For a complimentary copy of the award-winning self-improvement book on latest ways to turn down anger, anxiety, sadness and guilt, visit http://www.GuidetoSelf.com and enter your name and email. This top self-help book (Guide to Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought) outlines the latest tools to manage your own mind, turn up the volume on love, joy, hope, interest, passion, curiosity, awe, self-compassion and more. Managing  your mind leads to greater physical health, better relationships, more enjoyment in life and healthier relationships. What’s not to like?!

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22. July 2010 by John Schinnerer.

Hi! My name is John Schinnerer, Ph.D. I have spent the past 20 years seeking the best, proven tools to turn UP the volume on happiness along with ways to turn DOWN the volume on negative emotions. All this leads to greater happiness and much more success.Studies have shown that success follows happiness, NOT the other way around. People LIKE to be around folks who are happy. They flock to them. Then, happy people are provided with more opportunities - in business, in relationships, and in wealth.

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John Schinnerer, Ph.D. is in private practice teaching men anger management & the latest ways to deal with destructive negative emotions. He also helps men discover happier, more meaningful lives. His Ph.D. is from U.C. Berkeley. John is Founder of Guide To Self, a company that coaches men to happiness and success. He wrote the award-winning, “Guide To Self: The Beginner’s Guide To Managing Emotion and Thought” and his blog, Shrunken Mind, was named top 3 in positive psychology (http://drjohnblog.guidetoself.com).Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@johnschin
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22. July 2010 by John Schinnerer.

Happiness is … being healthy, wealthy and wise

Adrian White, Analytic Social Psychologist at the University of Leicester produces first ever global projection of international differences in subjective well-being; the first ever World Map of Happiness.

UK 41st out of 178 countries for happiness.

Happiness is found to be most closely associated with health, followed by wealth and then education.

A University of Leicester psychologist has produced the first ever ‘world map of happiness.’

Adrian White, an analytic social psychologist at the University’s School of Psychology, analysed data published by UNESCO, the CIA, the New Economics Foundation, the WHO, the Veenhoven Database, the Latinbarometer, the Afrobarometer, and the UNHDR, to create a global projection of subjective well-being: the first world map of happiness.

The projection, which is to be published in a psychology journal this September, will be presented at a conference later in the year. Participants in the various studies were asked questions related to happiness and satisfaction with life. The meta-analysis is based on the findings of over 100 different studies around the world, which questioned 80,000 people worldwide. For this study data has also been analysed in relation to health, wealth and access to education.

Whilst collecting data on subjective well-being is not an exact science, the measures used are very reliable in predicting health and welfare outcomes. It can be argued that whilst these measures are not perfect they are the best we have so far, and these are the measures that politicians are talking of using to measure the relative performance of each country.

The researchers have argued that regular testing as a collaboration between academics in different countries would enable us to track changes in happiness, and what events may cause that. For example what effect would a war, or famine, or national success have on a country’s members’ happiness. .

Adrian White said: “The concept of happiness, or satisfaction with life, is currently a major area of research in economics and psychology, most closely associated with new developments in positive psychology. It has also become a feature in the current political discourse in the UK.

“There is increasing political interest in using measures of happiness as a national indicator in conjunction with measures of wealth. A recent BBC survey found that 81% of the population think the Government should focus on making us happier rather than wealthier.

“It is worth remembering that the UK is doing relatively well in this area, coming 41st out of 178 nations.

“Further analysis showed that a nation’s level of happiness was most closely associated with health levels (correlation of .62), followed by wealth (.52), and then provision of education (.51).

“The three predictor variables of health, wealth and education were also very closely associated with each other, illustrating the interdependence of these factors.

“There is a belief that capitalism leads to unhappy people. However, when people are asked if they are happy with their lives, people in countries with good healthcare, a higher GDP per captia, and access to education were much more likely to report being happy.

“We were surprised to see countries in Asia scoring so low, with China 82nd, Japan 90th and India 125th. These are countries that are thought as having a strong sense of collective identity which other researchers have associated with well-being.

“It is also notable that many of the largest countries in terms of population do quite badly. With China 82nd, India 125th and Russia 167th it is interesting to note that larger populations are not associated with happy countries.”

“The frustrations of modern life, and the anxieties of the age, seem to be much less significant compared to the health, financial and educational needs in other parts of the World. The current concern with happiness levels in the UK may well be a case of the ‘worried well’.”

The 20 happiest nations in the World are:

1. Denmark 
2. Switzerland 
3. Austria 
4. Iceland 
5. The Bahamas 
6. Finland 
7. Sweden 
8. Bhutan 
9. Brunei 
10. Canada 
11. Ireland 
12. Luxembourg 
13. Costa Rica 
14. Malta 
15. The Netherlands 
16. Antigua and Barbuda 
17. Malaysia 
18. New Zealand 
19. Norway 
20. The Seychelles

Other notable results include:

23. USA 
35. Germany 
41. UK 
62. France 
82. China 
90. Japan 
125. India 
167. Russia

The three least happy countries were:

176. Democratic Republic of the Congo 
177. Zimbabwe 
178. Burundi

###

To view an interactive version of the map, download a .EPS format for publication, or to view extra information visit:http://www.le.ac.uk/pc/aw57/world/sample.html. High Definition Formats are available from University of Leicester press office: email pressoffice@le.ac.uk

Use of the map is subject to the credit line “Adrian White, Analytic Social Psychologist, University of Leicester. The data used to construct the map were extracted from a meta-analysis published by the New Economics Foundation (Marks, N. et al. (2006). The Happy Planet Index. London: New Economics Foundation).”

 From EurekAlert!

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