I am Always Late

How many people feel bored, tired, too much stressed out, or just sickened of their jobs? How many of us get up every morning and experience pleasant emotions thinking of their workplace? Obviously, not to too many of us. A great deal of people go to their work just because they have to or because they receive a fair and satisfying compensation for their work. Some of us hate our jobs so much that they are always looking for reasons to avoid spending their day is the office, and delay their coming to the workplace by creating amazing excuses for being always late. Psychologists say that being unhappy and dissatisfied with our working life is one of the main causes for our daily stresses and developing such a common bad habits as being late.

Therefore, it is necessary to take urgent measures on improving our satisfaction from our work and making our staying in the offices or at our workplaces more pleasant. How to do that, you can ask? What can we do to feel more comfortable at workplace? A group of researchers from Ohio State University carried out a small study with a purpose to find out what kind of things can help us boost our satisfaction at workplace and make us feel more comfortable. For this interesting experiment, the scientists invited not experienced office workers, but 19 students who were asked to spend their time in improvised offices, at the tables with everything they needed to spend their day studying and getting ready for their final exams. At that, they were asked to report about every activities and their feelings about what they are doing.

It turned out that the students were able to define certain activities which played a role of motivators and evoked the most pleasant feelings in them. Such factors and playing music at workplace, as well as having an opportunity to chat with friends online were mentioned as the most effective stimulating factors for all students. These kind of activities were able to satisfy emotional, social, and mental needs of the students. Though, as the scientists managed to measure, these activities did not help boost productivity and improve the quality of work, they helped the students feel much better and much more comfortable at workplace.

In addition, further research has demonstrated that such activity as multitasking can being more satisfaction and evoke positive emotions in most of office workers. Multitasking used to be considered stressful and something that actually lowers our performance at work. However, doing several things at a time brings us benefits of feeling better about what we do and how we perform at work, thus, it can be more useful. “There’s this myth among some people that multitasking makes them more productive,”  Zheng Wang, Ph.D, director of the Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations’s graduate specialization in Global Negotiation and Conflict Management, commented on the findings of the study. He said that multitasking is becoming more and more common in our times, just like walking and talking to a phone is an absolutely ordinary thing for all of us.

There is a common belief that losers – whether they are losers in a certain competition or game, or they are total losers in this life – are usually acting more aggressively, and the winners usually act more tolerant and kind toward the defeated. However, it was found out that the realities of our life made winners act much more aggressively and tough towards the losers. Not only psychological tests and studies have shown this tendency, I am sure that all of us observed this type of aggressive behavior of the high and mightiest of our times almost everywhere around. Today’s psychologists and social experts are vividly discussing this social phenomenon in modern mass media.

“It seems that people have a tendency to stomp down on those they have defeated, to really rub it in,” said Brad Bushman,  professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University. His specialists carried out a couple of social modeling experiments with a number of participants (mainly college students), trying to find out how today’s winners behave toward the losers. It turned out that those who win a competition tend not only to show their superior position, but also act as aggressive as possible: in particular, in the task which involved using sound as an indicator of their feelings, the winners always used the loudest possible sound to indicate their emotions of aggression.

The cause of this saddening tendency is to be discovered yet, and the psychologists suggest that aggression is a reaction of the winners on their being superior and powerful which they become after winning a competition or something else in this life. The cause can be the feeling of power which is usually exercised by aggressive behavior. “People were more aggressive when they were better off than when they were worse off than others,” says the expert. Very often the aggression of the winners is directed toward not only the defeated, but also toward other people as well. Unfortunately, winning in something makes most of us forget that actually other people can be better and win in something else.

Therefore, we are actually facing a dilemma: we can stick with winners in this life, who are more aggressive and more tough to the people around, or we shall stick with losers, who can be a little less aggressive and more kind, but still failing to achieve success. What idea can be better – it’s up to everyone of us. Whatever your decision is going to be, there’s no need in fearing the winners and sympathizing the losers, cos’ this life is a vary complex game, and one day you are a winner, and another day you can be a loser, too. That is why we all should avoid aggressive behavior and being tough toward the others, for our own safety and success in this life.

Success is something that can be achieved by using own talents, skills, knowledge, luck, as well as by using a combination of many minor factors, and sometimes such factors are absolutely strange and seemingly unrelated. Actually, it is not something new that a person’s name can determine his or her destiny to a certain extent. However, could you ever imagine that the people with easy-to-say names have much higher chances to achieve professional or personal success in this life, be more healthy and wealthy, more well-thought-of, respected and reputable, as well as have lower risks of developing a nasty habit of being always late?

The findings of a study of Australian specialists from Melbourne University’s School of Psychological Sciences suggest that those people with tongue-twisters names have much tougher life and have to face much more problems of all sorts compared to those people who have easy-to-say names. Our names play a very important role in how we are perceived by the others, and if your name is Spencer, Benson or Sherman, you will be judged much more positively than those people whose names are hard to pronounce. At that, specialists are convinced that the folks with easy-to-say names are usually receiving special treatments from teachers, more promotions from their employers at work, and so on.

“The effect is not due merely to the length of a name, or how foreign-sounding or unusual it is, but rather how easy it is to pronounce,” Dr Simon Laham, a leader of the study and an expert from Melbourne University’s School of Psychological Sciences, commented on the findings of his expert team. During the study, the specialists looked at the names and their professional or personal achievements. It turned out that those with surnames like O’Sallivan or Morten were ranked among the easiest and the most “successful” for their owners. The names of foreign origin like Loughnane, Farquharson, or Katorjevskiy, found the place among the hardest names to pronounce, thus being less positively taken.

The experts pointed on the fact that those people with difficult to pronounce names reported about their getting very stressed and dejected when the people around them fail or do not spend efforts for pronouncing or spelling their names in a correct manner. A great deal of people with foreign origin who come to or reside in other countries, are very well familiar with this kind of problem. Having not an easy-to-say name sometimes results in emotional problems, a lack of professional success and self-esteem, depression, sadness, and – being always late. Read more about the findings of this interesting study in the latest issue of the online Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.