Stamkou and colleagues investigate the effects of being awed on children. The Stamkou-lead team reports that during their study “children between 8 and 13 years old viewed movie clips that elicited awe, joy, or a neutral (control) response. Children who watched the awe-eliciting clip were more likely to spend their time on an effortful task (Study 1) and to donate their experimental earnings (Studies 1 and 2), all toward benefiting refugees.
Adikesavan and Ramasubramanian studied the implications of hotdesking at universities. They determined that “University faculty, researchers and graduate students are increasingly working out of hotdesks, nonterritorial workspaces available on a ‘first come first served’ basis and cleared of all work and personal possessions at the end of every work session. . . . participants [doctoral students] work early or late to secure suitable hotdesks, perform important tasks in locations other than the study site, incur co-working space and home office costs, etc.
Leon’s work has ramifications for the design of spaces where UV radiation might be present. He reports that “Temperature may be a proxy for UV radiation in the heat-aggression association. . . . Heat is associated with human aggression in field research, assumedly by affecting emotions, but it is not in laboratory experiments. Since this may be so because temperature functions as a proxy for UV radiation in field settings, not in the laboratory, this research tested, across 126 countries, whether temperature loses its predictive capacity when the electromagnetic variable is controlled.
Ayoko and teammates reviewed how office noise influences employee mood (affect), which is particularly important because more positive moods enhance cognitive performance, getting along with other people, wellbeing, and health. The research team reports that data collected in an open office showed that higher levels of perceived office noise were linked to more negative moods, and those more negative moods could in turn be tied to greater employee withdrawal and task conflict as well as to people trying to mark their physical territories: “Specifically, we found that, as perceived open-pla
Comparing workplace effects
Dang and team studied how people spend time on green roofs. They report that their research focused on a green roof space in Sydney, Australia which included “a garden, a concrete open space and a raised grass area amounting to 1,200 m2, [that] is above parts of the university’s library and classrooms, and is easily accessible by staff, students, and members of the public. . . . users, most commonly, relaxed or socialised on the green roof, with exercise a far less frequent activity.
Srna, Barasch, and Small researched the implications of viewing objects that signal the status of owners; their findings have broad implications for the design of both spaces and the objects in them. The Srna team reports that they “stud[ied] the implications of status signaling for cooperation. Cooperation is principally about caring for others, which is fundamentally at odds with the self-promotional nature of signaling status. . . . we find that people recognize the relative advantage of modesty (i.e., the inverse of signaling status) and behave strategically to enable cooperation.
Some conversations are as easy as pie, they may even be about pie. Others deal with difficult issues, such as less that optimal professional performance. Neuroscience indicates how design can encourage those more challenging discussions to flow smoothly, whether the people talking are in the same place at the same time or connecting electronically.
Faur and Laursen link classroom seat locations and friendships via a study whose findings are consistent with much prior research. Study participants were in grades 3-5. The researchers found that “students sitting next to or nearby one another were more likely to . . . be involved in reciprocated friendships than students seated elsewhere in the classroom. Longitudinal analyses indicated that classroom seating proximity was associated with the formation of new friendships. . . . Seat assignments were not random.
Migliore, Rossi-Lamastra, and Tagliaro studied, via a literature review, gender issues in workplaces. They conclude that “Within the broader context of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) matters, gender issues have attracted ample attention from scholars and policymakers. . . . The reviewed articles document a general convincement [conviction] shared by different scientific fields that the workspace affects women and men differently. The results show that space is a crucial element for enhancing gender equality in the workplace.”