The Main Emotions Caused By Multitasking

What multitasking does to your brain and the emotions.

What multitasking does to your brain and the emotions.

Multitasking mostly makes people feel sad and fearful, new research finds.

Juggling emails, reports and other activities creates a tense working environment.

In contrast, people who have a relatively uninterrupted period to work find it easier to maintain a neutral emotional state.

The study suggests that allowing emails to continually interrupt is linked to negative emotions, even anger.

A previous study has shown that changing from one activity to another interferes with brain activity and may reduce productivity by up to 40%,

Multitasking could even shrink the brain.

Dr Ioannis Pavlidis, study co-author, said:

“Not only do people experience stress with multitasking, but their faces may also express unpleasant emotions and that can have negative consequences for the entire office culture.”

The study analysed the facial expressions of 26 knowledge workers as they tried to write an essay.

Half received interrupting emails they had to respond to during the task.

The other half received all the emails in one batch so they were not interrupted while writing the essay.

The results showed that those who were continually interrupted displayed facial expression of sadness and fear.

Those who remained mostly uninterrupted maintained a neutral expression throughout.

Dr Pavlidis said:

“Individuals who engaged in multitasking appeared significantly sadder than those who did not.

Interestingly, sadness tended to mix with a touch of fear in the multitasking cohort.

Multitasking imposes an onerous mental load and is associated with elevated stress, which appears to trigger the displayed sadness.

The simultaneous onset of fear is intriguing and is likely rooted to subconscious anticipation of the next disruption.”

In the office, where a room full of people are all suffering (and causing) the same interruptions, the sadness and fear can spread like wildfire.

Dr Pavlidis said:

“Emotional contagion can spread in a group or workplace through the influence of conscious or unconscious processes involving emotional states or physiological responses.”

Many people are working from home during the pandemic, noted Dr Pavlidis:

“Currently, an intriguing question is what the emotional effect of multitasking at home would be, where knowledge workers moved their operation during the COVID 19 pandemic.”

The study was published in the Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Blank et al., 2020).

How Neurofeedback Can Improve Attention (M)

People can learn to control their brain waves when they are given feedback about the electrical activity in their brains.

People can learn to control their brain waves when they are given feedback about the electrical activity in their brains.


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How To Tell When Someone’s Mind Is Wandering

There will be a test, so I hope you are paying attention.

There will be a test, so I hope you are paying attention.

When a person starts to blink more rapidly, it suggests their mind is wandering, research finds.

Blinking sets up a tiny barrier against the outside world, allowing the brain to focus on something different.

The researchers were inspired by neuroscientific findings that parts of the brain are less active when the mind wanders.

Dr Daniel Smilek, the study’s first author, said:

“And we thought, OK, if that’s the case, maybe we’d see that the body would start to do things to prevent the brain from receiving external information.

The simplest thing that might happen is you might close your eyes more.”

For the study people read a passage from a book while their eye movements and blinks were monitored.

Randomly, people were stopped and asked whether they were paying attention or not.

The results showed people blinked more when they had switched off from the text and were thinking of something else.

Dr Smilek said:

“What we suggest is that when you start to mind-wander, you start to gate the information even at the sensory endings — you basically close your eyelid so there’s less information coming into the brain.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Smilek et al., 2010).

How Most People Are Killing Their Productivity

It can feel really good but it is reducing productivity by up to 40%.

It can feel really good but it is reducing productivity by up to 40%.

Multitasking can reduce productivity by up to 40%, research finds.

And now brain scans show why.

Changing from one activity to another interferes with brain activity.

This makes the end result much worse than if we focus on one thing at a time.

Dr Iiro Jääskeläinen, a neuroscientist and one of the study’s authors, said:

“We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure different brain areas of our research subjects while they watched short segments of the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and James Bond movies.”

Sometimes the films were cut into 50 second fragments, other times they watched full 6.5 minute segments.

Obviously, in reality, we would hope to focus on one task for more than 6.5 minutes — but this is just to simulate the effects of task switching.

The scans tracked the areas of the brain that are important in understanding narratives.

The results showed that the brain works more efficiently when only tracking one task at a time.

Dr Jääskeläinen said that completing one task a day beats trying to do a dozen things at once.

The problem is that multitasking can feel good, despite being less efficient:

“It’s easy to fall into the trap of multitasking.

In that case, it seems like there is little real progress and this leads to a feeling of inadequacy.

Concentration decreases, which causes stress.

Prolonged stress hinders thinking and memory.”

Social media, Dr Jääskeläinen said, is a particularly challenging problem:

“Social media is really nothing but multitasking, with several parallel plots and issues.

You might end up reading the news or playing a game recommended by a friend.

From the brain’s perspective, social media only increases the load.”

Perhaps worse, multitasking could even be causing changes to the structure of the brain, a 2014 study found:

“Using laptops, phones and other media devices at the same time could be shrinking important structures in our brains, a new study may indicate.

For the first time, neuroscientists have found that people who use multiple devices simultaneously have lower gray-matter density in an area of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional control.”

The study was published in the journal Human Brain Mapping (Lahnakoski et al., 2017).

Multitasking image from Shutterstock

What Children Can Teach Us About Paying Attention

Thinking like a five-year-old can help you learn more in a new environment.

Thinking like a five-year-old can help you learn more in a new environment.

Young children have one cognitive talent that most adults have forgotten.

That is the ability to pay attention to everything.

As adults we learn to focus our attention and block out distractions.

But, sometimes being distracted means noticing and learning more.

Professor Vladimir Sloutsky, study co-author, explained:

“We often think of children as deficient in many skills when compared to adults.

But sometimes what seems like a deficiency can actually be an advantage.

That’s what we found in our study.

Children are extremely curious and they tend to explore everything, which means their attention is spread out, even when they’re asked to focus.

That can sometimes be helpful.”

The study had adults and children watching a series of shapes appearing on a screen.

Some, they were told to look for; others (‘non-target shapes’), they were supposed to ignore.

Adults did slightly better at spotting the shapes they were supposed to be looking for but, said Professor Sloutsky:

“…the children were much better than adults at noticing when the non-target shape changed.

What we found is that children were paying attention to the shapes that they weren’t required to.

Adults, on the other hand, tended to focus only on what they were told was needed.”

Professor Sloutsky continued:

“The point is that children don’t focus their attention as well as adults, even if you ask them to.

They end up noticing and remembering more.

The ability to focus attention is what allows adults to sit in two-hour meetings and maintain long conversations, while ignoring distractions.

But young children’s use of distributed attention allows them to learn more in new and unfamiliar settings by taking in a lot of information.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Plebanek & Sloutsky, 2017).

This Picture Helps People Control Their Thoughts

Cognitive control helps people resist temptations and make decisions that benefit them in the long-term.

Cognitive control helps people resist temptations and make decisions that benefit them in the long-term.

Pictures of cold temperatures help people to control their thoughts, new research finds.

Imagining yourself in that cold environment helps to ‘cool down’ any quick emotional responses.

Dr Idit Shalev, who led the study, said:

“Metaphorical phrases like ‘coldly calculating,’ ‘heated response,’ and ‘cool-headed’ actually have some scientific validity, which we demonstrate in our study.”

Studies have already shown that people who are actually colder, exhibit more cognitive control, Dr Shalev said:

“Previous research focused on the actual effect of temperature on the psychological phenomenon known as ‘cognitive control.’

But this is the first time we were able to measure the effects of perceived temperature.”

For the study, people were asked to simply look in the other direction to a moving object.

This can be difficult as the eye is naturally drawn towards a moving object.

Beforehand, some people were shown summery pictures, others shown wintry scenes.

They had to imagine they were present in the picture.

Dr Shalev said:

“The result indicated that those viewing the cold landscape did better and that even without a physical trigger, cognitive control can be activated through conceptual processes alone.

While signals of warmth induce a relaxed attitude, cool signals trigger alertness and a possible need for greater cognitive control.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Research (Halali et al., 2017).

This is What Heavy Multitasking Could Be Doing To Your Brain

Multitasking may affect crucial areas of the brain’s emotional and cognitive centres.

Multitasking may affect crucial areas of the brain’s emotional and cognitive centres.

Using laptops, phones and other media devices at the same time could be shrinking important structures in our brains, a new study may indicate.

For the first time, neuroscientists have found that people who use multiple devices simultaneously have lower gray-matter density in an area of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional control (Loh & Kanai, 2014).

Multitasking might include listening to music while playing a video game or watching TV while making a phone call or even reading the newspaper with the TV on.

Kep Kee Loh, the study’s lead author, said:

“Media multitasking is becoming more prevalent in our lives today and there is increasing concern about its impacts on our cognition and social-emotional well-being.

Our study was the first to reveal links between media multitasking and brain structure.”

The study used scans of people’s brains along with a questionnaire about their use of media devices, newspapers and television.

People who multitasked more across different media had lower gray-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC: indicated by white dots in the image above).

This part of the brain, which lies towards the front, is mostly involved in aspects of cognitive and emotional control: things like empathy, decision-making and how we process rewards.

The study fits in with previous research suggesting that media multitasking is associated with emotional problems, like anxiety and depression, as well as cognitive problems, like poor attention.

The researchers found that this association had nothing to do with personality.

Both the study’s authors were quick to point out that this is a preliminary study which only finds a connection; it does not tell us what is causing what.

For example, it could be that those with a smaller ACC are more prone to media multitasking, not that multitasking is causing these changes in the brain.

However, Loh said:

“The exact mechanisms of these changes are still unclear.

Although it is conceivable that individuals with small ACC are more susceptible to multitasking situations due to weaker ability in cognitive control or socio-emotional regulation, it is equally plausible that higher levels of exposure to multitasking situations leads to structural changes in the ACC.”

We will have to wait for a future study which follows people over time.

This can examine how multitasking and brain structures change, and can give us another clue to this intriguing puzzle.

Image credit: Loh & Kanai (2014)