(Press-News.org) ANN ARBOR--Employees seeking to boost their productivity at work should take a nap--yes, sleeping on the job can be a good thing.
A new University of Michigan study finds that taking a nap may be an effective strategy to counteract impulsive behavior and to boost tolerance for frustration.
Napping, the researchers say, can be a cost-efficient and easy strategy to increase workplace safety. In other words, employers may find their employees more productive when the workplace has nap pods in the workplace or extended break times are offered.
It's becoming increasingly common for people, especially adults, to not sleep an entire night. This can negatively impair a person's attention and memory, as well as contribute to fatigue.
U-M researchers examined how a brief nap affected adults' emotional control. The study's 40 participants, ages 18-50, maintained a consistent sleep schedule for three nights prior to the test.
In a laboratory, participants completed tasks on computers and answered questions about sleepiness, mood and impulsivity. They were randomly assigned to a 60-minute nap opportunity or no-nap period that involved watching a nature video. Research assistants monitored the participants, who later completed those questionnaires and tasks again.
Those who napped spent more time trying to solve a task than the non-nappers who were less willing to endure frustration in order to complete it. In addition, nappers reported feeling less impulsive.
Combined with previous research demonstrating the negative effects of sleep deprivation, results from this latest study indicate that staying awake for an extended period of time hinders people from controlling negative emotional responses, said Jennifer Goldschmied, the study's lead author.
"Our results suggest that napping may be a beneficial intervention for individuals who may be required to remain awake for long periods of time by enhancing the ability to persevere through difficult or frustrating tasks," said Goldschmied, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology.
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The study's authors also include Philip Cheng, Kathryn Kemp, Lauren Caccamo, Julia Roberts and Patricia Deldin.
The findings appear in the current online issue of Personality and Individual Differences.
Maybe it sounds like a cow and bull story, but researchers in Egypt are developing a biometric identification system for cattle that could reduce food fraud and allow ranchers to control their stock more efficiently. The system described in the International Journal of Image Mining uses the unique features of a prominent part of the animal to identify the beasts. No, it's not hoof prints or an udder body part - it's the bovine muzzle, no pair of which are exactly alike, according to computer scientist Hamdi Mahmoud of BeniSuef University, in Cairo.
Meat products are currently ...
June 29, 2015 - In recent years, a large majority of US plastic surgeons have adopted fat grafting techniques as part of their approach to facelift surgery, reports a study in the July issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).
Fat grafting--transferring small amounts of the patient's own fat in strategic areas--"has become a common technique utilized by most surgeons today performing facial rejuvenation," according to the new research by Dr. Sammy Sinno, a plastic surgeon at New York ...
As yet another music streaming service comes online to rival the countless available outlets for so many different genres, a new approach to classifying music to make archiving, sorting and music discovery easier is published in the International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies.
Rare is the musical artist described as genre-defying. Most singers and musicians tend to stick to a particular genre, whether electronic dance music, reggae, classical, folk, jazz, rock or Indian genres such as Bhangra and Ghazal, or any of hundreds of other categories. Listeners ...
SAN DIEGO, Calif., June 29 -- Research conducted at San Diego State University shows that societal acceptance of working mothers is at an all-time high.
Researchers analyzed data from nearly 600,000 respondents from two nationally representative surveys --one of U.S. 12th graders and the other of adults -- taken between 1976 and 2013. The goal was to understand how attitudes towards women's work and family roles have changed in the U.S. since the 1970s.
They found that millennials are significantly more accepting of working mothers than previous generations were at ...
Los Angeles, CA (June 29, 2015) US adults and adolescents are now significantly more accepting of mothers who work fulltime, but a growing minority from younger generations believe that wives should mind the household and husbands should make decisions for the family, according to new research out today in the Psychology of Women Quarterly (a SAGE journal).
"Students are more accepting of mothers working, but a growing minority believes that men should be the rulers of the household or more believe that women should work, but still have less power at home," wrote researchers ...
An editorial by primary care researchers at Plymouth University Peninsula Schools of Medicine and Dentistry, and published today, Monday 29 June 2015 in the British Journal of General Practice, analyses the GP role in the sickness certification process and the new Fit for Work scheme and suggests that GPs are key to supporting individuals to maintain the hope and belief that they can work, "rather than adding to the numbers of individuals off work on long term sickness who may have been able to work."
The Fit for Work Scheme will be introduced in most regions in England ...
Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have discovered what regulates an enzyme that is central to the growth of cancer tumours. This could be of great value to future cancer treatment.
Danish researchers from the University of Copenhagen have discovered what controls the enzyme that aids the growth of cancer tumours. These findings could be of great value to cancer treatments and has just been published in the renowned journal, Nature Communications.
The enzyme is called ADAM17 and it aids growth in cells.
"ADAM17 is very important to the growth of cancer ...
The Food Safety and Technology Research Centre under the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has developed a new method for rapid authentication of edible oils and screening of gutter oils. Authentication of edible oils has been a long-term issue in food safety, and becomes particularly important with the emergence and widespread use of gutter oils in recent years. However, the conventional analytical approach for edible oils is not only labor intensive and time consuming, but also fails to provide a versatile ...
It is generally assumed that marriage has a positive influence on health and life expectancy. But does this "marriage bonus" also apply to the health indicator of body weight? Researchers at the University of Basel and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development have investigated this question in cooperation with the market research institute GfK. Specifically, they compared the body mass index of married couples with that of singles in nine European countries. The results of their study have now been published in the journal Social Science & Medicine.
Numerous studies ...
Ann Arbor -- While the number of graduates from family or adult nurse practitioner programs continues to rise, student applications to pediatric nurse practitioner and neonatal nurse practitioner programs are falling. Yet there is capacity in PNP and NNP training programs and unmet demand for graduates.
Researchers determined that most of the child-focused programs have vacancies in each class, even when some class sizes have already been scaled back due to the downward trend in applications.
Their findings are based on telephone surveys of directors at all PNP and ...
