When health risks go down, worker productivity goes up

April 8, 2015
Science Daily/Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
Changes in employee health risk factors have a significant impact on work productivity, reports a new study. The productivity benefits of improved health are "cumulative over time," highlighting the need for companies to make "continuous investments in the culture of health," according to the study.

The productivity benefits of improved health are "cumulative over time," highlighting the need for companies to make "continuous investments in the culture of health," according to the study by Laura Haglund-Howieson, MBA, of StayWell in St Paul, Minn., and colleagues.

The researchers analyzed health assessment surveys from nearly 97,000 workers between 2009 and 2011. The employees' "Health Risk Scores" were analyzed as predictors of work absenteeism as well as "presenteeism" -- health-related issues limiting work ability. At the initial survey, there was a "fairly strong correlation" between health risks and productivity. In addition, reductions in health risks between surveys were related to improved productivity in future years -- an effect that was cumulative over time.

"The key implication is that health improvements must be maintained over time so the productivity impacts can accumulate," Haglund-Howieson and coauthors write. They note that average health risks decreased "slightly but significantly" over the three years of the study -- probably because of the health promotion programs that were available to employees.

The effects of changes in health risks were relatively small, suggesting that other factors not considered in the study also affect productivity. The researchers suggest that additional types of policies -- such as flexible work times and worker recognition programs -- may be necessary to improve productivity for all workers.
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150408113259.htm

Study links insomnia to impaired work performance in night shift workers

April 27, 2015
Science Daily/American Academy of Sleep Medicine
A new study of night shift workers suggests that overnight occupational and cognitive impairment is more strongly correlated to insomnia than it is to sleepiness.

Results show that night shift workers classified as alert insomniacs had the highest level of impairment in work productivity and cognitive function, which was significantly worse than controls. This occupational impairment was more severe in alert insomniacs than in insomniacs with excessive sleepiness. The study also found that alert insomniacs reported significantly greater fatigue than sleepy insomniacs, which emphasizes the clinical importance of distinguishing between fatigue and sleepiness.

"Our findings are important to everyone who is dealing with night shift work," said principal investigator Valentina Gumenyuk, PhD, who is currently director of the MEG Neuroimaging Center at Meadowlands Hospital in Secaucus, New Jersey. "Our study reaffirms that insomnia within shift work disorder demands clinical attention, and it suggests that treatments focusing on the relief of excessive sleepiness in shift work disorder may not sufficiently improve work-related outcomes."

Study results are published in the April issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, shift work disorder is associated with a recurring work schedule, such as night shifts or rotating shifts, that overlaps the usual time for sleep. It is characterized by a reduction in total sleep time along with complaints of insomnia or excessive sleepiness. Reduced alertness related to shift work disorder may be a safety hazard during work and while commuting. It has been estimated that approximately 20 percent of the workforce in industrialized countries is employed in a job that requires shift work.

The research was conducted at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, where Gumenyuk was a research instructor. The final analysis involved 34 permanent night workers, 26 of whom were diagnosed with shift work disorder. Along with lead author Ren Belcher, Gumenyuk conducted an overnight lab protocol in which participants stayed awake for 25 hours in a dimly lit, private room. Participants wore an EEG cap to measure brain activity associated with attention and memory, and an event-related brain potential task assessed functional abilities. Objective sleepiness was assessed with a nocturnal multiple sleep latency test (MSLT). Study subjects also completed questionnaires to evaluate sleepiness, insomnia severity and work productivity.

According to the authors, the impairments found in night shift workers who were alert insomniacs have practical and serious consequences for workplace safety and occupational health. The study results emphasize the importance of aggressively treating insomnia in night shift workers, which may improve work productivity and safety.
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150427112914.htm

Shiftwork can affect your health

May 18, 2015
Science Daily/Elsevier
Workers with nontraditional schedules are burdened by sleep-related health problems and poor metabolic health, according to a new report. Shiftworkers in the study were significantly more likely than traditional schedule workers to be overweight (47.9% vs. 34.7%). They also experienced more sleep problems such as insomnia (23.6% vs. 16.3%), insufficient sleep (53.0% vs. 42.9%), or excessive wake-time sleepiness (31.8% vs. 24.4%).

"Shiftwork employees are particularly vulnerable to experiencing sleep problems as their jobs require them to work night, flex, extended, or rotating shifts," explained lead investigator Marjory Givens, PhD, an ‎Associate Scientist with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. "Shiftworkers are more commonly men, minorities, and individuals with lower educational attainment and typically work in hospital settings, production, or shipping industries."

The investigators used cross-sectional data from the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin (SHOW) collected from 2008-2012. SHOW is a population-based health examination survey that includes home- and clinic-based interviews and physical examinations. In this analysis, 1593 participants were assessed using measures from the physical examination to calculate body mass index and determine obesity or overweight status. Type-2 diabetes (T2D) was assessed in 1400 subjects using either self-report of physician-diagnosed T2D or glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) equal to or greater than 6.5% as determined from a blood sample obtained at the physical examination.

Shiftworkers were significantly more likely than traditional schedule workers to be overweight (47.9% vs. 34.7%). They also experienced more sleep problems such as insomnia (23.6% vs. 16.3%), insufficient sleep (53.0% vs. 42.9%), or excessive wake-time sleepiness (31.8% vs. 24.4%). Since shiftwork and sleep problems have both been implicated in poor metabolic health, this study asked whether sleep problems may play a role in shiftworker health disparities. Dr. Givens and her colleagues found that experiencing sleep problems was positively associated with being overweight/obese or diabetic. Moreover, even though sleep problems did not fully explain the relation between shiftwork and overweight or diabetes, these association appear to be stronger among shiftworkers who were not able to obtain sufficient sleep (less than seven hours per day), suggesting that the adverse metabolic consequences of shiftwork could be partially alleviated by sufficient sleep.

Two particular strengths of this study are that it draws from a general population sample and primary outcomes (overweight and diabetes status) were defined according to objective markers (measured weight, height, and HbA1c). Potential limitations include unmeasured confounding factors, the potential for systematic biases in self-reports of sleep duration and sleep quality, and an inability to determine a causal relationship due to the cross-sectional nature of the study.

According to Dr. Givens, "This study adds to a growing body of literature calling attention to the metabolic health burden commonly experienced by shiftworkers and suggests that obtaining sufficient sleep could lessen this burden. More research in this area could inform workplace wellness or healthcare provider interventions on the role of sleep in addressing shiftworker health disparities."
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150518081603.htm

Natural sounds improve mood and productivity

May 19, 2015
Science Daily/Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
Playing natural sounds such as flowing water in offices could boosts worker moods and improve cognitive abilities in addition to providing speech privacy, according to a new study.

An increasing number of modern open-plan offices employ sound masking systems that raise the background sound of a room so that speech is rendered unintelligible beyond a certain distance and distractions are less annoying.

"If you're close to someone, you can understand them. But once you move farther away, their speech is obscured by the masking signal," said Jonas Braasch, an acoustician and musicologist at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.

Sound masking systems are custom designed for each office space by consultants and are typically installed as speaker arrays discretely tucked away in the ceiling. For the past 40 years, the standard masking signal employed is random, steady-state electronic noise -- also known as "white noise."

Braasch and his team are currently testing whether masking signals inspired by natural sounds might work just as well, or better, than the conventional signal. The idea was inspired by previous work by Braasch and his graduate student Mikhail Volf, which showed that people's ability to regain focus improved when they were exposed to natural sounds versus silence or machine-based sounds.

Recently, Braasch and his graduate student Alana DeLoach built upon those results to start a new experiment. In this ongoing work, they expose 12 human participants to three different sound stimuli while performing a task that requires them to pay close attention: typical office noises with the conventional random electronic signal; an office soundscape with a "natural" masker; and an office soundscape with no masker. The test subjects only encounter one of the three stimuli per visit.

The natural sound used in the experiment was designed to mimic the sound of flowing water in a mountain stream. "The mountain stream sound possessed enough randomness that it did not become a distraction," DeLoach said. "This is a key attribute of a successful masking signal."

At large, they want to find out if workers who are listening to natural sounds are more productive and overall in better moods than the workers exposed to traditional masking signals.

Braasch said using natural sounds as a masking signal could have benefits beyond the office environment. "You could use it to improve the moods of hospital patients who are stuck in their rooms for days or weeks on end," Braasch said.

For those who might be wary of employers using sounds to influence their moods, Braasch argued that using natural masking sounds is no different from a company that wants to construct a new building near the coast so that its workers can be exposed to the soothing influence of ocean surf.

"Everyone would say that's a great employer," Braasch said. "We're just using sonic means to achieve that same effect."
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150519151217.htm

Workplace intervention improves sleep of employees' children

May 21, 2015
Science Daily/Penn State
A workplace intervention designed to reduce employees' work-family conflict and increase schedule flexibility also has a positive influence on the sleep patterns of the employees' children, researchers report.

The intervention, Support-Transform-Achieve-Results (STAR), includes training supervisors to be more supportive of their employees' personal and family lives, changing the structure of work so that employees have more control over their work time, and changing the culture in the workplace so that colleagues are more supportive of each other's efforts to integrate their work and personal lives.

The research team conducted several other tests of the effects of the intervention. In an earlier study, for example, they showed that STAR resulted in employed parents spending more time with their children without reducing their work time.

In this study, the researchers found that children whose parents participated in the STAR intervention showed an improved quality of sleep one year later compared to the children of employees who were randomly assigned to a control group. The researchers published their findings in the June issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.

"These findings show the powerful effect that parents' workplace experiences can have on their children," said Susan McHale, distinguished professor of human development and family studies, Penn State. "The STAR intervention focused solely on workplace experiences, not on parenting practices. We can speculate that the STAR intervention helped parents to be more physically and emotionally available when their children needed them to be."

The youth in the study were ages 9 through 17, which is a crucial age group for developing healthy sleep habits, as youth become more independent and more involved in friends, school and social activities, McHale said.

McHale and her team measured sleep patterns by interviewing employees' children on the phone every evening for eight consecutive evenings both before and after the STAR intervention. Each night they asked the children about their sleep on the prior night, including what time they went to bed, what time they woke up that morning, how well they slept and how hard it was to fall asleep.

An important part of this method was collecting the data on consecutive nights. "Precision of reports is enhanced by getting the data on a daily basis," McHale said.
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150521121047.htm

Glancing at greenery on a city rooftop can markedly boost concentration levels

May 26, 2015
Science Daily/University of Melbourne
Glancing at a grassy green roof for only 40 seconds markedly boosts concentration, a new study concludes. The green roof provided a restorative experience that boosted those mental resources that control attention, researchers say.
http://images.sciencedaily.com/2015/05/150526093611_1_540x360.jpg

The study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, gave 150 students a boring, attention-sapping task. The students were asked to press a key as a series of numbers repeatedly flashed on a computer screen, unless that number was three.

They were given a 40-second break midway through the task to view a city rooftop scene. Half the group viewed a flowering meadow green roof, the other half looked out onto a bare concrete roof.

After the break, students who glanced at the greener vista made significantly less errors and demonstrated superior concentration on the second half of the task, compared to those who viewed the concrete roof.

The green roof provided a restorative experience that boosted those mental resources that control attention, researchers concluded.

Lead researcher Dr Kate Lee, of the University of Melbourne Faculty of Science, said just a moment of green can provide a boost for tired workers.

"We know that green roofs are great for the environment, but now we can say that they boost attention too. Imagine the impact that has for thousands of employees working in nearby offices," Dr Lee said.

"This study showed us that looking at an image of nature for less than a minute was all it took to help people perform better on our task.

The research focused on micro-breaks, those short and informal breaks, which happen spontaneously throughout the day.

"It's really important to have micro-breaks. It's something that a lot of us do naturally when we're stressed or mentally fatigued," Dr Lee added. "There's a reason you look out the window and seek nature, it can help you concentrate on your work and to maintain performance across the workday.

"Certainly this study has implications for workplace well-being and adds extra impetus to continue greening our cities. City planners around the world are switching on to these benefits of green roofs and we hope the future of our cities will be a very green one."

The next research project Dr Lee and her team plan to undertake tests whether looking at workplace greening makes people more helpful and creative.
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150526093611.htm

High levels of moral reasoning correspond with increased gray matter in brain

June 3, 2015
Science Daily/Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania
Individuals with a higher level of moral reasoning skills showed increased gray matter in the areas of the brain implicated in complex social behavior, decision making, and conflict processing as compared to subjects at a lower level of moral reasoning, according to new research.
http://images.sciencedaily.com/2015/06/150603181807_1_540x360.jpg

Moral development research pioneered by psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg in the mid-20th century shows that people progress through different stages of moral reasoning as their cognitive abilities mature. Neuroscience has recently reinvigorated moral psychology by introducing new methods for studying moral decision-making. However, no study to date has quantified brain structures supporting individual stages of moral reasoning.

"To investigate this question, we employed a sample of MBA students ages 24 to 33, past the age at which structural brain maturation is complete, and tested their moral reasoning, then looked at the level of gray matter in the brains of a subset of subjects," said senior author Hengyi Rao, PhD, a research assistant professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging in Neurology and Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine.

"MBA students were ideal candidates for this work, as the Wharton curriculum addresses issues of moral decision-making and reasoning," explained Diana Robertson, PhD, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School and an author of the study. "We aimed to investigate whether the stage of moral reasoning is reflected in structural brain architecture."

A total of 67 MBA students were administered the Defining Issue Test to determine which pattern of thought or behavior, known as cognitive schema, each student used when reasoning about moral issues. In it, students were presented with complex moral dilemmas such as medical assisted suicide and asked them to choose the relevance of each of 12 given rationales. Based on the results, subjects were then assigned to one of seven schema types which represent increasing levels of moral development. Students then underwent MRI scanning to investigate differences in gray matter volume between students who reached the post-conventional level of moral reasoning compared to those who have not reached that level yet.

Subjects also underwent personality testing and were placed into one of the following categories: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Analysis showed higher scores in openness to experience and lower scores in neuroticism for participants at the more advanced levels of moral development.

With regard to brain structure, the team observed increased gray matter in the prefrontal cortex in subjects who reached the post-conventional level of moral reasoning compared to those who are still at a pre-conventional and conventional level. In other words, gray matter volume was correlated with the subject's degree of post-conventional thinking.

"This research adds an investigation of individual differences in moral reasoning to the expanding landscape of moral neuroscience," Rao said. "The current findings provide initial evidence for brain structural difference based on the stages of moral reasoning proposed by Lawrence Kohlberg decades ago. However, further research will be needed to determine whether these changes are the cause or the effect of higher levels of moral reasoning."
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150603181807.htm

Bright light after night shift may enhance alertness and cognitive performance

Using bright lights may be particularly effective for low light work environments when commutes that occur before dawn
June 11, 2015
Science Daily/American Academy of Sleep Medicine
Bright light at the end of a night shift may have potential as a countermeasure to improve driving performance, particularly for low light work environments and commutes that occur before dawn, a new study suggests.

Results show that temperature, subjective alertness and psychomotor vigilance performance decreased significantly across the night. Bright light significantly suppressed melatonin, but did not improve subjective alertness or psychomotor vigilance performance. Sleep deprivation markedly increased incidents, accidents, and the average lane position. These measures worsened with time on task. Bright light compared to dim light did not improve performance during the first 22 minute circuit, but across the two circuits bright light significantly attenuated the effect of time on task on incidents and accidents.

'We were most surprised to find that significant differences between the bright light condition and the dim light condition occurred in the second lap of the simulated driving task rather than immediately following the bright light exposure,' said study lead author Denise Weisgerber, a doctoral candidate at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. 'The immediate effects of bright light exposure may have been masked by the increased arousal associated with being placed in the driving simulator.'

The research abstract was published recently in an online supplement of the journal Sleep and was presented on June 9 in Seattle, Wash., at SLEEP 2015, the 29th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC.

The study group comprised 19 participants who were prescreened for chronotype, sleep disorders and motion sickness in the driving simulator. The majority were male, with a mean age of 23. A repeated measures, cross-over balanced design was used, with no less than one week between the following three conditions: no sleep deprivation, overnight sleep deprivation with 45 minutes of dim light exposure and overnight sleep deprivation with 45 minutes of bright light exposure. Subjects then received the light treatment, followed by a 45 minute driving test in a high-fidelity simulator.
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150611174203.htm

Causal pathway may link job stress, sleep disturbances

June 30, 2015
Science Daily/American Academy of Sleep Medicine
Promoting healthy sleep may be an effective strategy to improve life at work
There may be a reciprocal, causal pathway between job strain and disturbed sleep, implying that interventions to treat sleep problems may improve work satisfaction, researchers have learned.

Results show that higher work demands predicted subsequent sleep disturbances at the two-year follow-up. Similarly, sleep disturbances predicted a higher perception of stress, higher work demands, a lower degree of control, and less social support at work two years later. No relationship was found between disturbed sleep and physical work environment, shift work schedules or working hours.

"The results are important because they show that work demands influence stress negatively, and this link has rarely been investigated in longitudinal studies," said lead author and principal investigator Torbjörn Akerstedt, a professor in the department of clinical neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. "Sleep problems are abundant in the industrialized world, and we need to know where mitigation may be most effective."

Study results are published in the July issue of the journal Sleep.

Led by Akerstedt and lead author Johanna Garefelt, the research team analyzed data from the 2008 and 2010 waves of the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health. The study group comprised 4,827 participants with a mean age of 48 years, including 2,655 females and 2,171 males. Information regarding sex, age, and socioeconomic position were obtained from national register data. The Karolinska Sleep Questionnaire (KSQ) was used to identify disturbed sleep, which was defined as having difficulties falling asleep, restless sleep, repeated awakenings or premature awakening. Work demands, control at work and social support at work were measured using the Swedish version of the Demand-Control-Support Questionnaire.

According to the authors, their findings align with previous research showing that disturbed sleep increases stress response and emotional reactivity. The results imply that promoting better sleep may improve working life by reducing perceived job stress and minimizing negative attitudes toward work.

"The effect of sleep problems on stress emphasizes the importance of good sleep for functioning in everyday life," said Akerstedt.
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150630202042.htm

Anxious? Depressed? Blame it on your middle-management position

August 18, 2015
Science Daily/Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health
Individuals near the middle of the social hierarchy suffer higher rates of depression and anxiety than those at the top or bottom, according to researchers. Nearly twice the number of supervisors and managers reported they suffered from anxiety compared to workers. Symptoms of depression were reported by 18 percent of supervisors and managers compared to 12 percent for workers.

While social disadvantage related to income and educational attainment is associated with a higher risk of most adverse mental health outcomes, these latest findings show that people towards the middle of social hierarchies suffered higher rates of depression and anxiety based on their social class and position of power in the labor market.

"Contradictory class locations are those that embody aspects of both ownership and labor, and using this construct we found patterns of depression and anxiety that are not easily detected or explained with standard approaches," said first author Seth J. Prins, MPH, a doctoral student in Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health and fellow in the Psychiatry Epidemiology Training Program. "We explored how social class might in?uence depression and anxiety in ways that may be masked or incompletely explained by standard socioeconomic status measures."

The researchers based their findings on the largest representative population data set ever used to test these hypotheses directly: the 2001-2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC), a nationally representative survey of the U.S. population age 18 and older, interviewed in person. This study used data on the 21, 859 participants who were full-time workers. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Alcohol Use Disorder and Associated Disabilities Interview Schedule DSM-IV was used to assess DSM-IV psychiatric disorders.

The researchers estimated the prevalence and odds of any lifetime and previous 12-month depression and anxiety by occupational class categories, income, and education. Class designations were made by sorting respondents into three categories: owners, who identified as self-employed and earned greater than $71,500; managers and supervisors, who occupied executive, administrative or managerial positions; and workers, who were defined by various occupation categories in the NESARC including farmers and laborers.

"We chose to focus on depression and anxiety because the average age of onset is older than age 18, and these disorders are likely to arise after entry in the workforce," said Katherine Keyes, PhD, assistant professor of Epidemiology.

Prior research has shown that work stress and job strain are important risk factors in developing depression. Workers with little opportunity for decision-making and greater job demands show higher rates of depressive symptoms.

"Our findings highlight the need for population health research to both conceptualize and measure social class in ways that go beyond the standard measures of socioeconomic status," said Lisa M. Bates, ScD, assistant professor of Epidemiology, "Standard measures are most readily available, but can mask important complexity in the relationship between social class and population health."
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150818121755.htm