Category: Motivation

The thought made people more confident and boosted their performance.

Imagining a clear picture of a successful future can help motivate people to succeed, research finds.

Looking to the future — and focusing on a positive future identity — helps people deal with everyday stressful situations.

For the study, students from vulnerable backgrounds wrote about either their past or future successes.

Those who imagined positive futures were more motivated to take action.

They also displayed more confident body language in a mock interview and better performance in an academic test.

The effects were particularly beneficial for female students.

Dr Mesmin Destin, the study’s first author, said:

“The theory of identity-based motivation proposes that activating a focus on a successful future identity may be especially powerful in motivating students who are vulnerable during challenging academic situations to develop a sense of action readiness.

This involves feeling ready and able to take appropriate action when confronting difficulty.”

For the study, hundreds of students were given a mock interview after writing about their past or future success.

They were then given a difficult academic test.

Researchers looked at body language and the amount of effort students put into the test.

Dr Destin said:

“Activating imagined successful future identities appears to provide a potential pathway to enable vulnerable students to effectively navigate everyday stressors.

The findings therefore suggest that certain students may benefit from strategies that remind them to visualize their successful futures prior to any difficult and important task that they might otherwise be likely to avoid.”

The study was published in the journal Motivation and Emotion (Destin et al., 2018).

Fruits and vegetables boost happiness even quicker than health.

Eating 8 portions of fruit and vegetables a day provides the maximum boost to people’s happiness, a study finds.

The positive effect comes faster than the boost to health.

Up to 8 portions, the more portions people ate, the happier they were.

The effect on happiness of eating those 8 portions compared with none was dramatic.

In terms of life satisfaction, it was equivalent to the difference between being employed and unemployed.

The graph below shows the increase in life satisfaction with portions of fruit and vegetables consumed each day.

Graph courtesy of Mujcic & Oswald (2016)

It is the first time a large study has found that fruit and vegetables contribute to happiness on top of their well-known protective effect against cancer and heart disease.

Professor Andrew Oswald, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Eating fruit and vegetables apparently boosts our happiness far more quickly than it improves human health.

People’s motivation to eat healthy food is weakened by the fact that physical-health benefits, such as protecting against cancer, accrue decades later.

However, well-being improvements from increased consumption of fruit and vegetables are closer to immediate.”

The conclusions come from following over 12,000 people.

Participants kept food diaries and their psychological well-being was measured.

Within two years, those eating more fruits and vegetables felt better, the results showed.

Dr Redzo Mujcic, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Perhaps our results will be more effective than traditional messages in convincing people to have a healthy diet.

There is a psychological payoff now from fruit and vegetables — not just a lower health risk decades later.”

One possible mechanism by which fruit and vegetables affect happiness is through antioxidants.

There is a suggested connection between antioxidants and optimism.

And, if you need more encouragement:

• Eating More Vegetables Linked To 40% Better Memory

The study was published in the American Journal of Public Health (Mujcic & Oswald, 2016).

Attendance at fitness classes was 90% higher in the group that used this type of motivation.

Competition is one of the best motivators, a new study concludes.

It works much better than friendly support, which could actually backfire and reduce motivation, the researchers found.

The research involved college students being encouraged to attend classes at the University fitness centre.

The programme was managed through an internet-based social network.

The researchers tested the effects of four different types of social network interactions, some involving competition, others not.

The results showed that when competition was involved, attendance rates at fitness classes were 90% higher.

Dr Damon Centola, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Most people think that when it comes to social media more is better.

This study shows that isn’t true: When social media is used the wrong way, adding social support to an online health program can backfire and make people less likely to choose healthy behaviors.

However, when done right, we found that social media can increase people’s fitness dramatically.”

Whether it was individual or in groups — competition emerged as critical to motivation.

Dr Jingwen Zhang, the study’s first author, said:

“Framing the social interaction as a competition can create positive social norms for exercising.

Social support can make people more dependent on receiving messages, which can change the focus of the program.”

Dr Centola speculated on why social support may not have worked:

“Supportive groups can backfire because they draw attention to members who are less active, which can create a downward spiral of participation.

Competitive groups frame relationships in terms of goal-setting by the most active members.

These relationships help to motivate exercise because they give people higher expectations for their own levels of performance.”

In comparison, competition kept people pushing for more:

“In a competitive setting, each person’s activity raises the bar for everyone else.

Social support is the opposite: a ratcheting-down can happen.

If people stop exercising, it gives permission for others to stop, too, and the whole thing can unravel fairly quickly.”

The study was published in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports (Zhang et al., 2016).

Study tested how people feel 90 minutes after watching a tearjerking film.

People who watched a sad film were eventually in a better mood after watching it than they were before, a recent study found.

However, it took about 90 minutes, on average, to feel better after crying.

The research could help explain the function of crying.

Some argue that crying provides emotional relief.

And yet, when it is measured in the lab, crying makes people feel much worse.

The study showed 60 people two films known to be tearjerkers.

Their mood was measured right after watching the films, then after 20 minutes and 90 minutes.

Around half of the participants cried during the film: naturally they felt worse immediately afterwards.

The results showed, though, that after 20 minutes the criers had recovered their initial dip in mood.

It is probably this dip and then recovery that makes people feel that crying has improved their mood.

However, after another 60 minutes the criers felt even happier than they did before watching the films.

None of the mood shifts were related to how much people cried.

Asmir Gračanin, the study’s lead author, said:

“After the initial deterioration of mood following crying, it takes some time for the mood not only to recover but also to be lifted above the levels at which it had been before the emotional event.”

Talking of crying, here is another strange finding about happiness and crying:

https://www.spring.org.uk/2014/11/the-reason-overwhelming-happiness-makes-people-cry.php

The study was published in the journal Motivation and Emotion (Gračanin et al., 2016).

Watching film image from Shutterstock