職場劍走偏鋒:寫字練習提升工作表現

Stressed workers could improve their problem-solving skills by taking a few minutes at the start of the day to write a note about something important to them, a study suggests。

一項研究表明，壓力大的工作者可以在開始一天工作之前抽出幾分鐘時間寫紙條，記下對他們來說重要的事情，以幫助他們提高解決問題的技能。

Writing a short essay about the importance of friends and family, for example, can counteract the damaging effects of chronic stress on our ability to complete tasks, researchers found。

研究者發現，通過寫下諸如朋友和家庭重要性的短文，能幫助我們對抗長期壓力帶來的負面結果，以完成手中的任務。

Highly stressed people performed Almost 50 per cent worse on a problem-solving test than a low-stressed group, but their scores caught up after carrying out the writing task。

壓力大的人羣在解決問題的測驗中的表現要比壓力小的人差50%，但如果他們先完成寫字任務，表現則會好很多。

Previous studies have shown that stress can harm our ability to solve problems, but the simple exercise could help chronically stressed workers improve their creativity and insight, and boost the performance of underachieving school pupils, researchers said。

研究者說，之前的研究已經證明壓力會影響我們解決問題的能力，但這個(寫字)練習則能幫助壓力大的員工提升創造力和洞察力，同時提高那些表現不佳的小學生的成績。

The researchers asked 73 students to rank 11 values, including relationships with friends and family, politics and music, in order of how important each was to them。

研究者們讓73名學生根據對自己的重要性給11項價值標準排序，這些標準包括與朋友和家人的關係，政治與音樂等。

One group of participants then wrote an essay about why the top entry on their list mattered to them, while the "control" group wrote about why one of their lowest-ranked values might be important to someone else。

其中一組參與者隨後寫一篇短文，描述爲什麼排在前面的標準對他們自己很重要，另一個對照組則寫一篇短文，說明爲什麼他們排在後面的標準可能對其他人來說很重要。

All participants then completed a problem-solving word game. In the control group, those who reported the highest levels of stress over the past month scored almost 50 per cent lower than those with the lowest stress levels。

然後所有參與者完成一項解決問題式的文字遊戲。在對照組中，那些在過去一個月壓力最大的成員們比壓力最小的成員們分數低了50%。

But chronically stressed people who had written about something which was important to them before completing the test scored just as highly as low-stressed participants。

但是，如果那些有長期壓力的人們在完成文字遊戲測試前先寫下一些對他們來說很重要的東西，測試分數就和那些壓力較小的成員們一樣。

Writing in the Public Library of Science ONE journal, the psychologists from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh said the activity could "buffer the negative effects of chronic stress on task performance"。

本次研究結果發表在《公共科學圖書館-綜合》期刊上，該文作者，來自匹茲堡卡內基梅隆大學的心理學家表示，寫字活動能“緩衝工作中長期壓力帶來的負面效應”。