Shutterstock.com/Sergey Nivens
Keeping Current
The Changing Brain
We’ve all heard the saying “great
minds think alike,” but new research
indicates that perhaps we all think
alike—at least until a certain age.
attention tends to decline, and we
end up attending to more ‘distracting’
information than younger adults. As a
result, older adults end up attending
to a more diverse range of stimuli and
so are more likely to understand and
interpret everyday events in different
ways than younger people.”
Campbell notes that this is not
necessarily a bad thing. “There may
well be benefits to this distractibility.
Attending to lots of different
information could help with our
creativity, for example.”
The study appears in the August
5, 2015, issue of the journal
Neurobiology of Aging.
Coaching World
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The researchers were surprised
to find a great deal of uniformity
in younger subjects’ brain activity
during the television show. The
same parts of their brains tended
to “light up” during the same parts
of the program, indicating they
were reacting in the same way to
the material. The brains of the older
participants, however, were different,
both from the younger subjects
and each other. This implied that
they were responding differently
to the material, and were most
likely distracted. The differences
were seen in the parts of the brain
responsible for attention and the
processing of language.
Karen Campbell, Ph.D., now a
postdoctoral fellow at Harvard
University and one of the study’s
authors, explains: “As we age,
our ability to control the focus of
Obviously, police officers function in
an unusually high-stress environment.
They serve the public while also facing
the threat of personal danger in the
course of their work.
The good news is that the study
also revealed that the quality of
relationships officers have with their
peers and supervisors can help reduce
the potentially harmful effects of
workplace anxiety.
More specifically, those officers
whose supervisors and co-workers
provided emotional support
and fostered a positive work
environment were able to overcome
many of the anxiety-related effects
on their job performance.
—Justin Hannah
Shutterstock.com/KieferPix
Previous studies have shown
changes in the way the brain’s
networks interact as we age, but
most experiments used very basic
or artificial stimuli. Researchers
from the University of Cambridge
wanted to see how our brains
respond to complex, lifelike events,
and how these reactions change as
we get older. In the study, adults
ages 18–88 were shown an episode
of the television show Alfred
Hitchcock Presents. As they watched
the program, their brain activity
was measured.
“Workplace anxiety is a serious concern
not only for employee health and wellbeing, but also for an organization’s
bottom line,” says Trougakos, an
expert on organizational behavior.
The Power of
Relationships
It is difficult to perform your work
to the best of your ability if you’re
dealing with anxiety on the job. A
new study from the University of
Toronto which involved surveying
257 Royal Canadian Mounted Police
officers from across Canada found
that the effect that anxiety has on job
performance is closely related to the
quality of employee relationships.
The study , conducted by U of T
associate profe 76