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Few disciplines of behavioral science, if any, have gathered more attention in recent years than positive psychology. The volume of happiness research that’s poured from the labs of scientists such as APS Fellow Ed Diener and APS James McKeen Cattell and William James Fellow Martin Seligman has sparked enormous public interest and inspired countless popular books. Some of the appeal is no doubt the power of the work. Researchers have linked positive emotions with all sorts of social, cognitive, and physical health benefits. But some of it may just be that given a choice between feeling happy or not, most of us prefer the former.

 

What the positive psychology movement often fails to describe, however, are the boundaries of these benefits. It’s great to feel good; it’s less great to feel manic or to feel good when you’re supposed to feel fear or anger or to make the pursuit of happiness your only goal in life. In a 2011 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a group of researchers led by June Gruber of Yale University surveyed what they call the “dark side” of happiness: a grey line of literature that exposed the times, ways, and degrees to which the emotion stops being useful and starts being harmful.

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About 5 years ago a colleague in the Sociology Department told the following anecdote to one of the authors:

One of my students applied for a job as a summer camp counselor at a Christian camp. She said the interview went well, and it looked like she was going to get the job. Then after a couple of weeks she got a letter from the camp that she was turned down for the job. She said she called them to find out what had happened, at which point they disclosed that they had looked at her Facebook profile and saw pictures of her binge drinking with her friends. This behavior was inconsistent with the kind of values they promoted at the camp, and they decided that she would not be a good fit with the camp.

This anecdote got us thinking. In essence, the camp’s decision was based on a new variety of selection technique, one that we have not really addressed yet as a field. Specifically, the use of the Internet to screen job applicants as a kind of background check was a new approach. Of course, selection experts have been discussing using the Internet for submitting applications and resumés, as well as for selection testing (with its issues of test security, measurement equivalence, etc.), but little or nothing in I-O psychology has been done on the topic of screening job applicants on the basis of what is available on the Internet about them. Some initial work has been done in the measurement of personality from webpages (e.g., Gosling, Ko, Manarelli, & Morris, 2002; Marcus, Machilek, & Schütz, 2006; Vazire & Gosling, 2004), and a number of court cases have appeared in the press on Internet background checks for employment (e.g., Mullins v. Department of Commerce, 2007; Spanierman v. Hughes, 2008; Pietrylo v. Hillstone Restaurant Group, 2009). Practitioner websites and blogs started paying attention to this phenomenon as well (e.g., Fishman & Morris, 2010; Kowske & Southwell, 2006; Rosen, 2010; Juffras, 2010). The Society for Human Resource Management has been keeping track of the use of the Internet for screening candidates since at least 2006 (SHRM, 2008), and the trend has been growing. But 5 years ago in much of the I-O and management academic literature, this intriguing and disturbing new trend was strangely absent.

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Workers who spend time on online role-playing games have the edge in the real world of business, according to new research.

A study by Newcastle University Business School and the University of Crete suggests that games such as World of Warcraft, Lineage II and The Lord of the Rings Online could be used to help develop staff training techniques.

Researchers found that massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) can improve leadership skills and make staff into faster learners.

They followed a sample of employees for one month and found that many of the combat-related activities needed to gain points and solve quests have similarities with common work tasks.

These include collaboration, meeting targets, team work, strategic planning, allocating resources and recruiting new players to form groups.

The better the subjects performed in the games, the more these skills spilled over into their work lives.

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84% of working women told ForbesWoman and TheBump.com that staying home to raise children is a financial luxury they aspire to. what’s more, more than one in three resent their husbands for not earning enough to make that dream a reality.

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When evaluating job applicants, employers want to be sure that they choose the right person for the job. Many employers, from consulting firms to federal agencies, will ask prospective employees to complete extensive tests and questionnaires to get a better sense of what those employees might be like in an office setting. But new research published in Perspectives on Psychological Science suggests that a different factor — employee interests — may be a better way to predict who will perform well on the job.

See on www.psychologicalscience.org