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This will make my son happy. A new study says that a virtual soccer management game   yields real-life lessons in human behavior, according to newswise.com. A study using a soccer management game to explore more than a half-million participants' monetary choices confirmed it's possible to use a virtual world to mimic real-world behavior on a grand scale, the web site reports. The results open the door to the predictive use of game worlds in policymaking, commercial and other real-life applications, newswise.com quotes co-author  Edward Castronova , a professor in  The Media School  at Indiana University. The study  confirmed the viability of conducting controlled research using "big data" on a scale many times larger than the typical social science experiment. "Our work shows that huge social experiments with game worlds and their thousands of players are not only feasible but also relevant for real-world society," Castronova reports. "We could...

I suppose it makes sense that getting the support of your supervisor would make you a better worker. But a new study says that it's critical to employee well-being and workforce readiness, according to newswise.com. Also, not surprisingly, fewer women than men report opportunities to develop skills needed for career growth. Nearly half of American workers are concerned about the changing nature of work, and although most report that they have the skills they need to perform their current job well, those without supervisor support for career development are more likely to distrust their employer and plan on leaving within the next year, according to a new survey released by the American Psychological Association, newswise.com reports. “Employee growth and development is a key element of a psychologically healthy workplace, but it’s often overlooked in employers’ workplace well-being efforts,” says David Ballard, PsyD, MBA, head of APA’s Center for Organizational Excellenc...

Having trouble getting your team to work well together?  Maybe, call a friend. A new study has found that teams work better with a little help from your friends, according to newswise.com. Workplace teams are better when they include your friends.  Researchers analyzed the results of 26 different studies and found that teams composed of friends performed better on some tasks than groups of acquaintances or strangers. Teams with friends were particularly effective when the groups were larger and when their focus was on maximizing output. “Working with friends is not just something that makes us feel good – it can actually produce better results,” says  Robert Lount , co-author of the study and associate professor of  management and human resources  at The Ohio State University’s  Fisher College of Business , at newswise.com. The researchers analyzed studies about teams that used participants with established friendships and that included teams ...

Did you know that relying on social media for news can . . .cause you more stress? Exposure to high rates of conflicting information, which you find on social media, during an emergency is linked to increased levels of stress, and those who rely on text messages or social media reports from unofficial sources are more frequently exposed to rumors and experience greater distress, according to research led by the University of California, Irvine, newswise.com reports.  “During a crisis situation, like a school shooting or lock-down, people often seek to stay informed about what’s happening. However, when announcements and updates from official channels are lacking or irregular, there’s a high risk that rumors will fill the void,” says principal investigator Roxane Cohen Silver, UCI professor of psychology & social behavior. “We wanted to explore how people coped with ambiguity during a campus lockdown and how a communications vacuum could lead to rumor generation, rumor tran...

The economy is booming.  Stocks are through the roof.  And your neighbor, who just got a great new job, is putting a pool in the backyard. Progress is great.  Unless, of course, it's not happening for you, according to newswise.com. Economic progress can cause people to feel dispossessed and angry if they don’t feel like they are also advancing, a new study notes. “The results indicate that a booming economy may not be the incumbent government’s sole insurance against loss of public support,” says  Cecilia Hyunjung Mo  of Vanderbilt University, one of three authors of the study, “ Economic Development, Mobility, and Political Discontent."   “People must feel they are doing well and sharing society’s success.” The study was conducted using face-to-face interviews in 2013-2014 in Pakistan, covering 2,090 households in 76 villages in the Punjab, Sidh and Kyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) provinces. Subjects were divided into four groups. Those primed into vi...

Guess that's why they get the big money.  But researchers now say that the best way to recognize emotions in others is to -- wait for it.  Listen to them. If you want to know how someone is feeling, it might be better to close your eyes and use your ears: people tend to read others’ emotions more accurately when they listen and don’t look, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. Newswise.com reports that, in  a series of five experiments involving more than 1,800 participants from the United States,  individuals who only listened without observing were able, on average, to identify more accurately the emotions being experienced by others. The one exception was when subjects listened to the computerized voices also used in  he study, which resulted in the worst accuracy of all.   In each experiment, individuals were asked either to interact with another person or were presented with an interaction between two ot...

Here we go again.   Cheating happens more often when teachers push students to get good grades than when they focus more on providing a content-rich class, according to newswise.com. Previous research suggests instructors who emphasize mastering the content in their classes encounter less student cheating than those who push students to get good grades. But that's not all of it.  This new study found emphasizing mastery isn’t related as strongly to lower rates of cheating in classes that students list as their most disliked. Students in disliked classes were equally as likely to cheat, regardless of whether the instructors emphasized mastery or good grades. The factor that best predicted whether a student would cheat in a disliked class was a personality trait: a high need for sensation, claims  Eric Anderman , co-author of the study and professor of  educational psychology at The Ohio State University . People with a high need for sensation are risk-takers,...