Archives for June 2014

BUSINESS: Compassion in the Workplace

June 1, 2014 By Knowledge@Wharton Staff Writers

For some employees, a typical day at the office might begin with a barrage of work-related questions from impatient colleagues who have been awaiting their arrival. For others, it might start off with a series of cheerful greetings from co-workers, questions about how their family members are doing or perhaps an offer to grab a quick cup of coffee before the daily work deluge begins.

According to Wharton management professor Sigal Barsade, there is reason to believe that the latter scenario — which illustrates what she refers to as “companionate love” in the workplace — is not only more appealing, but also is vital to employee morale, teamwork and customer satisfaction.

Companionate love is shown “when colleagues who are together day in and day out, ask and care about each other’s work and even non-work issues,” Barsade says. “They are careful of each other’s feelings. They show compassion when things don’t go well. And they also show affection and caring — and that can be about bringing somebody a cup of coffee when you go get your own, or just listening when a co-worker needs to talk.”

To demonstrate the value of companionate love in the workplace, Barsade and co-author Olivia “Mandy” O’Neill, Assistant Professor of management at George Mason University, performed a 16-month longitudinal study at a long-term health care facility involving 185 employees, 108 patients and 42 of those patients’ family members. Barsade and O’Neill set out to measure the effect of companionate love on emotional and behavioral outcomes of employees, as well as on health outcomes of patients and the satisfaction of those patients’ family members. The results of their study are included in a paper titled, “What’s Love Got to Do with It? A Longitudinal Study of the Culture of Companionate Love and Employee and Client Outcomes in the Long-Term Care Setting,” which will be published in an upcoming issue of Administrative Science Quarterly.

To conduct their research, Barsade and O’Neill constructed a scale designed to measure tenderness, compassion, affection and caring. But rather than simply asking the participants if they felt or expressed those emotions themselves, the researchers asked to what degree people saw their colleagues expressing them. They also brought in independent raters to observe those four elements of the facility’s culture, as well as asked family members to rate the culture. Last, they added ratings of “cultural artifacts” (how the culture is displayed in the physical environment) that reflect a culture of companionate love — for example, having spaces with a “homey” environment, throwing birthday parties, etc. “We have a very robust measurement consisting of all the possible lenses on the culture of the unit,” Barsade says.

This study was among the few to focus on emotional culture rather than cognitive culture, Barsade notes. “What we’re talking about is shared emotions. Our field tends to focus on shared cognitions of people at work, yet an understanding of shared emotions of people at work can also have important outcomes for organizations.”

When Love Is Infectious

Barsade and O’Neill believed long-term care would be the ideal setting to test their hypothesis that companionate love is a positive force in the workplace. “In these facilities, you have people dealing with residents who are there for a long time. You have employees who have chosen a caring industry,” Barsade says. “So it was a natural first stop for looking at the concept of emotional culture. Even though this has to do with how employees are treating each other, and not necessarily how they are treating their clients, we argue that if they treat each other with caring, compassion, tenderness and affection, that will spill over to residents and their families.”

One of the most significant findings in the study was that a culture of companionate love reduces employees’ withdrawal from work. Barsade and O’Neill measured employee withdrawal by surveying workers about their levels of emotional exhaustion and by studying their rates of absenteeism. They found that units with higher levels of companionate love had lower levels of absenteeism and employee burnout. The researchers also discovered that a culture of companionate love led to higher levels of employee engagement with their work via greater teamwork and employee satisfaction.

This could occur even with employees who don’t necessarily feel the high levels of companionate love that exist in their units. “The view that dominated our field for 20 years was that anytime you engage in emotional labor — meaning you’re changing or regulating your emotions for a wage –that’s going to lead to burnout,” Barsade says. “What we’re suggesting is that it’s more complicated than that. It may well be that even if you don’t start out feeling the culture of love — even if you’re just enacting it — it can lead to these positive outcomes. In addition, there is the possibility that as you enact companionate love, you will begin to feel it over time.”

The study also found that the culture of companionate love rippled out from staff to influence patients and their families. “Certified nursing assistants rated the mood of the residents, and the outside observers rated the culture. Those outside observers could predict that [patients] would be in a better mood if the culture among the staff was more loving,” Barsade says.

Barsade and O’Neill measured patient quality of life based on 11 factors commonly used to assess long-term care facilities, including comfort, dignity, satisfaction with the food and spiritual fulfillment. Across the board, Barsade says, there was a positive correlation between a culture of companionate love and patient quality of life.

Interestingly, however, when the researchers looked at the health outcomes of the patients, they didn’t find as much of an impact of companionate love as they expected. They measured three of the most critical outcomes for patients in long-term care: unnecessary trips to the emergency room, weight gain and incidence of ulcers from spending too much time in bed. They found that while a culture of companionate love did lead to fewer trips to the ER, it didn’t affect weight or ulcers.

“We statistically controlled for factors such as general patient health, physical functioning and degree of cognitive impairment, so it was quite a conservative test,” Barsade says. “But health effects are not always directly seen. I wouldn’t give up on it.”

Beyond Health Care Settings

There is one key question raised by Barsade’s and O’Neill’s research: Does companionate love matter in workplaces that don’t revolve around providing love and compassion to clients? To answer that question, they performed a second study involving 3,201 employees in seven different industries. Using the same scale they employed in the long-term care facility, the researchers found that a culture of companionate love positively correlated with job satisfaction, commitment to the company and accountability for performance.

The relationships they found in the long-term care setting held steady. “What we found is that companionate love does matter across a broad range of industries, including those as diverse as real estate, finance and public utilities,” O’Neill says. “But the interesting thing is that even though the overall baseline of companionate love can differ across industries, there was as much of a difference within industries as between industries. Overall, we found that — regardless of the industry baseline — to the extent that there’s a greater culture of companionate love, that culture is associated with greater satisfaction, commitment and accountability.”

O’Neill and Barsade believe that their initial findings in other industries argue for further investigation. And additional studies are already underway. For example, O’Neill is working with Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard on a study involving firefighters. “What we see is that companionate love acts as a helper for the problems they struggle with at work and outside of work,” O’Neill says. “For example, [firefighters] tend to have high levels of work-family conflict because of the stress that comes from the job. Companionate love actually helps to buffer the effect of job stress and work-family conflict on other outcomes.”

Barsade says her study in the long-term care facility has also inspired her to examine the role of other aspects of emotional culture at work. “We don’t just have one type of emotional culture,” she says. “We happen to be looking at a culture of companionate love here. But you could have a culture of anger. You could have culture of fear. You could have culture of joy. The natural second step is to look at how these factors influence one another, and then to look at the whole picture of how cognitive culture and emotional culture intersect.”

Already, though, the research seems to be pointing to a strong message for managers in all industries, Barsade says: tenderness, compassion, affection and caring matter at work. “Management can do something about this,” she says. “They should be thinking about the emotional culture. It starts with how they are treating their own employees when they see them. Are they showing these kinds of emotions? And it informs what kind of policies they put into place. This is something that can definitely be very purposeful — not just something that rises organically.”

This article is reprinted with revisions from Knowledge@Wharton, the online business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

SCIENCE: Social Connection and Health Infographic

June 1, 2014 By Emma Seppala

Social connection improves physical health, mental health, and emotional well-being. We all think we know how to take good care of ourselves: eat your veggies, work out and try to get enough sleep. But how many of us know that social connection is just as critical?

One landmark study showed that lack of social connection is a greater detriment to health than obesity, smoking, and high blood pressure.

On the other hand, strong social connection:

leads to a 50% increased likelihood of longevity, so it may even lengthen your life!
strengthens your immune system (research by Steve Cole shows that genes impacted by loneliness also code for immune function and inflammation)
helps you recover from disease faster

People who feel more connected to others have lower levels of anxiety and depression. Moreover, studies show they also have higher self-esteem, greater empathy for others, are more trusting and cooperative and, as a consequence, others are more open to trusting and cooperating with them. In other words, social connectedness generates a positive feedback loop of social, emotional, and physical well-being.

Unfortunately, the opposite is also true for those who lack social connectedness. Low levels of social connection are associated with declines in physical and psychological health as well as a higher likelihood for antisocial behavior that leads to further isolation.

Research shows that loneliness is on the rise. Despite its clear importance for health and survival, research shows that social connectedness is waning at an alarming rate in the US. A revealing sociological study showed that the modal number of close others (i.e., people with whom one feels comfortable sharing a personal problem) Americans claimed to have in 1985 was only three. In 2004 it dropped to zero, with over 25% of Americans saying that they have no one to confide in. This survey suggests that one in four people that we meet may have no one they call a close friend!

This decline in social connectedness may explain reported increases in loneliness, isolation, and alienation and may be why research is finding that loneliness represents one of the leading reasons people seek psychological counseling.

People low in social connection are more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and antisocial behavior, which tend to further increase their isolation, and could even lead to suicidal behaviors. Most poignantly, a landmark survey showed that lack of social connectedness predicts vulnerability to disease and death beyond traditional risk factors such as smoking, blood pressure, and physical activity! Eat your greens and exercise, yes, but don’t forget to connect.

Feel like you may be low on social connection?

Fear not! The good news is that social connection has more to do with your subjective feeling of connection than your number of friends. You could have 1,000 friends and still feel low in connection (thus the expression loneliness in a crowd) but you could also have no close friends or relatives but still feel very connected from within.

Emma Seppala, Ph.D. is the Associate Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. Emma completed her undergraduate degree at Yale University and Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University. Her doctoral research focused on interventions to increase compassionate behavior and social connectedness. She completed her post-doctoral research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Dr. Richard Davidson where she evaluated the effects of yoga- and meditation-based interventions for combat veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. Her research fields of expertise include compassion, emotion regulation, happiness, and mind-body interventions for well-being. You can learn more on her website at emmaseppala.com.

Republished with permission from emmaseppala.com.

LIFESTYLE: Seven Self-Compassionate Routine Changes

June 1, 2014 By Sejal Kapadia

From hugging eight times a day to spending your money on others, we look at the eight things you can do to feel better and be good to yourself, as advised by the scientists. Incorporating any of these into your day is a meaningful act of self-compassion.

1. Fit in one more hour of sleep

A 2003 study by The University of Surrey’s Sleep Research Centre found that just one more hour of sleep can make people happier and healthier. Those tested with an hour of less sleep at night had an increase in activity of those genes that are associated with processes such as inflammation, immune response, diabetes, and cancer risk. When the group had an hour of extra sleep, the reverse happened.

Another study by the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard Medical School found the following: “While a good night’s rest can regulate your mood and help you cope with the next day’s emotional challenges, sleep deprivation does the opposite by excessively boosting the part of the brain most closely connected to depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric disorders.” Getting proper sleep is an act of self-compassion for the body and the mind.

2. Exercise for 20 minutes in the morning

Gretchen Reynolds, columnist for The New York Times and author of The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer says the first 20 minutes of moving around provide most of the health benefits. “You get prolonged life and reduced disease risk. All of those things come in the first 20 minutes of being active,” says Reynolds.

Similarly, a 2012 study which tested memory levels with fitness by researchers in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire found that out of 54 adults, ages 18 to 36, those who had exercised during the preceding month but not on the day of testing generally did better on the memory test than those who had been sedentary. However, they did not perform nearly as well as those who had worked out that morning.

3. Spend your money on others

In the book Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, Michael Norton, an Associate Professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School, and Elizabeth Dunn, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, spent years collecting quantitative and qualitative research to explain how money can buy happiness, but only if we spend it in certain ways. One of their biggest findings was that giving money to others actually makes people happier. “One of the reasons is that it creates social connections,” says Norton. “If you have a nice car and a big house on an island by yourself, you’re not going to be happy, because we need people to be happy. By giving to another person, you’re creating a connection and a conversation with that person, and those things are really good for happiness.”

4. Surround yourself with happy people

Dr. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, researchers at Harvard and University of San Diego, found that each additional ‘happy’ friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%. They studied 4,739 people from 1983 to 2003, assessing their happiness every few years using a standard measure. Their research showed that happy people tend to be located in the centre of their social networks and in large clusters of other happy people. (To put the 9% into perspective, earning an extra $5,000 (£2972) of income in 1984 increased the probability of being happy by about 2%).

5. Meditate for 15 minutes daily

A 2005 study by the The National Center for Biotechnology Information demonstrated that those who meditated have a stronger, and thicker cortex– the part of the brain that processes emotions, attention and sensory awareness. The more the test group meditated, the thicker the cortex grew.

Rebecca Gladding, a clinical instructor and attending psychiatrist at UCLA also claims that meditation helps decrease anxiety. “It’s because the neural paths that link those upsetting sensations to the ‘Me Center’ (the part of the brain that constantly references back to you, your perspective and experiences) are decreasing,” said Gladding.

6. Don’t delay trying new things

Psychologist Rich Walker of Winston-Salem State University looked at 30,000 event memories and over 500 diaries, ranging from durations of 3 months to 4 years, and says that people who engage in a variety of experiences are more likely to retain positive emotions and minimize negative ones than people who have fewer experiences.

7. Hug at least eight times a day

Paul Zak, a pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics, has found that at least eight hugs per day can make you feel happier and more connected. When we hug, the levels of neurotransmitter oxytocin, which is commonly referred to as the ‘love’ or ‘trust’ hormone, rises significantly. In a Ted talk in 2011, Zak explained that after only 20 seconds of hugging a romantic partner, one can achieve a spike in oxytocin levels, as well as a decrease in blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol levels.

Other findings have shown a hug, pat on the back, and even a friendly handshake are processed by the ‘reward center’ in the central nervous system. “They can have a powerful impact on the human psyche, making us feel happiness and joy,” said neurologist Shekar Raman, based in Virginia. “And it doesn’t matter if you’re the toucher or touchee. The more you connect with others on even the smallest physical level— the happier you’ll be.”

Reprinted with revisions from The Stylist.

POETRY: The Guest House

June 1, 2014 By Elizabeth Pyjov

This beautiful poem by 13th century Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, captures the spirit of treating each person, each incident, and each event with openness and kindness. Rumi uses the metaphor of the guesthouse to highlight that all the things that happen to us are impermanent. Both events and mental events come and go, and we may as well treat them honorably and with compassion.

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.

meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

—Rumi, 13th century

PRACTICE: Compassion Meditation for Kids

June 1, 2014 By Heather Stang

Research indicates that compassionate children become caring and optimistic adults. Compassion can be cultivated through formal meditation techniques. Below is a modification of the classic compassion meditation, designed to appeal to kids.

Preparation

1. Find a relaxed, comfortable position to sit in.

2. Close your eyes. Place your hand over your heart and notice the rise and fall of your breath.

3. Take three full deep inhales and let the exhale fall out of your mouth with a sigh. As you do this, imagine you could relax all the muscles in your body.

4. Let your hands rest in your lap.

Guided Meditation

1. Picture in your mind the image of someone you love deeply. This could be a grandparent, a teacher, or even a pet. Notice how they look at you. Imagine they are smiling at you. Notice how that makes you feel. Imagine telling them how you feel. Wish for them “May you be safe and happy.”

2. Next, imagine that you are looking at your best friend. Notice your friend’s eyes and smile. Think of how much fun you have together. And imagine saying to your friend: “May you be safe and happy.”

3. Now imagine a person from school that you don’t know really well. Someone you don’t have a strong opinion about. You do not like or dislike this person, but you see them sometimes in the hall or cafeteria. Imagine saying to this person: “May you be safe and happy.”

4. This time, picture someone that you find to be a little difficult. You do not need to choose your worst enemy, but this is not your favorite person either. Imagine you could look this person in the eye and tell them: “May you be safe and happy.”

5. Finally, imagine that you could send these well wishes out to everyone in the world. People, animals, fishes and bugs too: “May they all be safe and happy.”

Reprinted with revisions from drgreen.com.

Heather Stang, MA is the author of Mindfulness and Grief, a book based on the 8 week groups she developed and now facilitates. Heather is a mindfulness meditation instructor and Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy practitioner at the Frederick Meditation Center, which she founded in 2014.