Experiments prompting people to engage in more prosocial behavior (e.g., acts of kindness) or simple social interactions (e.g., acting extraverted) have both shown promise in boosting well-being. However, little is known about how much the impact on well-being depends on the type of interpersonal interaction (i.e., social vs. prosocial) or on other proximal features (e.g., whether the interaction takes place online vs. in-person, the closeness of the relationship, or amount of social connection associated with a given interaction). We randomly assigned a sample of full-time employees recruited via a special employed mTurk sample (N = 754) to perform weekly acts of kindness online versus in-person, to engage in weekly social interactions online versus in-person, or to list their daily activities (control) over the course of 4 weeks. First, on average, all conditions reported improvements in well-being (i.e., increases in positive affect and life satisfaction, decreases in negative affect) across the 4-week intervention period. Second, relative to controls, the four experimental groups reported increases in general social connectedness over time. Finally, according to auxiliary analyses collapsed across the experimental condition, closer relationship with target and non-digital medium of delivery predicted episode-level social connection, which, in turn, was associated with general social connectedness and positive affect. We conclude that the "who" and the "how" of a behavior (i.e., its target, its delivery method, and the feelings of social connection generated) are important for well-being, but not the "what" (i.e., whether the behavior is social or prosocial). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

We examined the buffering effects of virtual coaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a pre-post quasi-experimental design, we compared change in well-being, social behaviour, and work outcomes for coached and non-coached samples (n = 1,005). We found that post-COVID outcomes were generally more positive for those who received coaching: they experienced positive gains in optimism, life satisfaction, authenticity, and productivity while those who did not receive coaching experienced a decline in those outcomes. Further, those who received coaching experienced larger growth in resilience and social connection. Changes in work engagement did not differ by group.

The experience of social exclusion in the workplace adversely impacts employees’ well-being, job satisfaction, and productivity, and no one quite knows what to do about it. In this report, we describe the development and testing of three ostracism interventions, designed to help people cope with the negative effects of being excluded by one’s team. Across five studies, participants were assigned to a virtual ball toss game where they were either included or excluded by their teammates. Afterwards, they were given a task where they could earn money for themselves, for their entire team, or for an unrelated group (charity). Excluded participants worked less hard for their teams (even when this meant sacrificing their own earnings). This sabotage effect was specific , meaning that excluded individuals worked less hard on behalf of their teams, but not when they worked for themselves or for charity. We devised three intervention strategies—perspective, mentorship, and empowerment—to combat the negative effects of ostracism on people’s willingness to work for their teams. These interventions were successful; each increased people’s persistence in a team-based reward task, and in some cases, even raised the outcomes of excluded teammates to levels observed in included teammates. The effectiveness of these interventions also replicated successfully, using preregistered hypotheses, methods, and analyses. These studies add novel insights to a variety of fields that have examined the consequences of social exclusion, including social psychology, organizational behavior, and management science.

Background Optimal mental health yields many benefits and reduced costs to employees and organizations; however, the workplace introduces challenges to building and maintaining mental health that affect well-being. Although many organizations have introduced programming to aid employee mental health and well-being, the uptake and effectiveness of these efforts vary. One barrier to developing more effective interventions is a lack of understanding about how to improve well-being over time. This study examined not only whether employer-provided coaching is an effective strategy to improve mental health and well-being in employees but also how this intervention changes well-being in stages over time. Objective The goal of this study was to determine whether BetterUp, a longitudinal one-on-one virtual coaching intervention, improves components of mental health and psychological well-being, and whether the magnitude of changes vary in stages over time. This is the first research study to evaluate the effectiveness of professional coaching through three repeated assessments, moving beyond a pre-post intervention design. The outcomes of this study will enable coaches and employers to design more targeted interventions by outlining when to expect maximal growth in specific outcomes throughout the coaching engagement. Methods Three identical assessments were completed by 391 users of BetterUp: prior to the start of coaching, after approximately 3-4 months of coaching, and again after 6-7 months of coaching. Three scales were used to evaluate psychological and behavioral dimensions that support management of mental health: stress management, resilience, and life satisfaction. Six additional scales were used to assess psychological well-being: emotional regulation, prospection ability, finding purpose and meaning, self-awareness, self-efficacy, and social connection. Results Using mixed-effects modeling, varying rates of change were observed in several dimensions of mental health and psychological well-being. Initial rapid improvements in the first half of the intervention, followed by slower growth in the second half of the intervention were found for prospection ability, self-awareness, self-efficacy, social connection, emotional regulation, and a reduction in stress (range of unstandardized β values for each assessment: .10-.19). Life satisfaction improved continuously throughout the full intervention period (β=.13). Finding purpose in meaning at work and building resilience both grew continuously throughout the coaching intervention, but larger gains were experienced in the second half of the intervention (β=.08-.18), requiring the full length of the intervention to realize maximal growth. Conclusions The results demonstrate the effectiveness of BetterUp virtual one-on-one coaching to improve psychological well-being, while mitigating threats to mental health such as excessive and prolonged stress, low resilience, and poor satisfaction with life. The improvements across the collection of outcomes were time-dependent, and provide important insights to users and practitioners about how and when to expect maximal improvements in a range of interrelated personal and professional outcomes.

Mattering, one's sense of the difference one makes in the world, has been variously described in psychological and philosophical literatures. We propose the experience of mattering is tied to the perceived impact of one's actions and is best understood as an action-oriented, context-dependent construct. We introduce the Organizational Mattering Scale (OMS) for measuring mattering in organizations. Across four studies, factor analysis revealed a general mattering factor and two sub-factors, recognition and achievement (CFI = .98, RMSEA = .06). Construct validity and predictive validity are established across a range of psychological and organizational measures. Notably, OMS scores were more related to self-efficacy than self-esteem (p < .01), and positively related to key business outcomes, including job satisfaction (r = .51, p < .01), having a leadership role (t = 6.91, p < .01), recent promotions (t = 2.26, p < .05) and retention (r = .31, p < .01).

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A systematic review of more than 200 published research studies found that happier people tend to be more successful in terms of the quality of their relationships, contributions to their community, higher performance, and achievement in their work. It’s no wonder there have been thousands of scientific papers published on the topic and a recent online search of the phrase ‘‘happiness at work’’ yielded nearly 1 million results. When Dr Laurie Santos first offered her course, ‘‘Psychology and the Good Life’’ to students at Yale University, it became the most popular class in Yale’s history. Response to the material has been so positive that they’re now offering an online version of the class. With burnout being declared by the World Health Organization to be a syndrome resulting from unsuccessfully managed workplace stress, health promotion professionals are looking for new ways to bolster employee mental and emotional wellbeing offerings. This issue of The Art of Health Promotion (TAHP) offers practitioners several examples of approaches being tested in real-world workplaces to elevate employee well-being overall and happiness in particular. Dr Viswanath and Dr Kubzansky from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness tee up the topic by sharing insights from their research and experience working with employers. They also shed light on the challenges of conducting happiness research, noting that some of the findings linking employee happiness to health and business outcomes are equivocal. I highly encourage readers wanting to learn more about their work to read their article in Time magazine’s special issue on ‘‘the science of happiness.’’ As I considered the content for this issue, I was tempted to focus purely on what the research tells us about effective approaches to define, measure, and influence employee happiness. But I also wanted to deliver on TAHP’s focus on translating research into practice. To that end, I invited 3 organizations that provide happiness interventions as a service offering to employers to share how they have applied scientific evidence to their interventions and employer case studies that demonstrate the kinds of outcomes they are observing, including business performance results that senior executives are most interested in. I also asked them to incorporate lessons they are learning about what is most effective in the delivery of happiness initiatives or guidance they would offer to organizations that want to develop their own programs. The team at BetterUp conducted an analysis on aggregated data from more than 2800 individuals across their book of business who have participated in their coaching programs rather than focusing on a single-employer experience. Dr Laurie Heap has devoted her work to improving student happiness but more recently has expanded her focus to employee populations and shared her experience working with Garmin to deploy an initiative for their employees. Experience Happiness rounds out the issue, sharing their collaborative work with R3 Continuum not just to deploy coaching for their employees but also to thoughtfully identify and measure the most meaningful key performance indicators to demonstrate the value of the initiative. While the contributors packed as much into each article as length limits permitted, you might find yourself still wanting more. In that case, I’d like to recommend some of the books I added to my reading pile while researching this topic. For an overview of the research linking happiness to improved performance for individuals, groups, and organizations as well as principles for underlying mechanisms contributing to those relationships, I recommend Shawn Achor’s 2010 book, The Happiness Advantage. It’s chock full of entertaining anecdotes and stories from his own research at Harvard University and his adventures experienced as

IMPORTANCE:Recent governmental and private initiatives have sought to reduce health care costs by making health care prices more transparent.OBJECTIVE:To determine whether the use of an employer-sponsored private price transparency platform was associated with lower claims payments for 3 common medical services.DESIGN:Payments for clinical services provided were compared between patients who searched a pricing website before using the service with patients who had not researched prior to receiving this service. Multivariable generalized linear model regressions with propensity score adjustment controlled for demographic, geographic, and procedure differences. To test for selection bias, payments for individuals who used the platform to search for services (searchers) were compared with those who did not use the platform to search for services (nonsearchers) in the period before the platform was available. The exposure was the use of the price transparency platform to search for laboratory tests, advanced imaging services, or clinician office visits before receiving care for that service.SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS:Medical claims from 2010-2013 of 502,949 patients who were insured in the United States by 18 employers who provided a price transparency platform to their employees.MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES:The primary outcome was total claims payments (the sum of employer and employee spending for each claim) for laboratory tests, advanced imaging services, and clinician office visits.RESULTS:Following access to the platform, 5.9% of 2,988,663 laboratory test claims, 6.9% of 76,768 advanced imaging claims, and 26.8% of 2,653,227 clinician office visit claims were associated with a prior search on the price transparency platform. Before having access to the price transparency platform, searchers had higher claims payments than nonsearchers for laboratory tests (4.11%; 95% CI, 1.87%-6.41%), higher payments for advanced imaging services (5.57%; 95% CI, 1.83%-9.44%), and no difference in payments for clinician office visits (0.26%; 95% CI; 0.53%-0.005%). Following access to the price transparency platform, relative claim payments for searchers were lower for searchers than nonsearchers by 13.93% (95% CI, 10.28%-17.43%) for laboratory tests, 13.15% (95% CI, 9.49%-16.66%) for advanced imaging, and 1.02% (95% CI, 0.57%-1.47%) for clinician office visits. The absolute payment differences were $3.45 (95% CI, $1.78-$5.12) for laboratory tests, $124.74 (95% CI, $83.06-$166.42) for advanced imaging services, and $1.18 (95% CI, $0.66-$1.70) for clinician office visits.CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE:Use of price transparency information was associated with lower total claims payments for common medical services. The magnitude of the difference was largest for advanced imaging services and smallest for clinical office visits. Patient access to pricing information before obtaining clinical services may result in lower overall payments made for clinical care.

Abstract Recently, findings on a wide range of auditory abnormalities among individuals with autism have been reported. To date, functional distinctions among these varied findings are poorly established. Such distinctions should be of interest to clinicians and researchers alike given their potential therapeutic and experimental applications. This review suggests three general trends among these findings as a starting point for future analyses. First, studies of auditory perception of linguistic and social auditory stimuli among individuals with autism generally have found impaired perception versus normal controls. Such findings may correlate with impaired language and communication skills and social isolation observed among individuals with autism. Second, studies of auditory perception of pitch and music among individuals with autism generally have found enhanced perception versus normal controls. These findings may correlate with the restrictive and highly focused behaviors observed among individuals with autism. Third, findings on the auditory perception of non-linguistic, non-musical stimuli among autism patients resist any generalized conclusions. Ultimately, as some researchers have already suggested, the distinction between impaired global processing and enhanced local processing may prove useful in making sense of apparently discordant findings on auditory abnormalities among individuals with autism.

Recently, findings on a wide range of auditory abnormalities among individuals with autism have been reported. TO date, functional distinctions among these varied findings are poorly established. Such distinctions should be of interest to clinicians and researchers alike given their potential therapeutic and experimental applications. This review suggests three general trends among these findings as a starting point for future analyses. First, studies of auditory perception of linguistic and social auditory stimuli among individuals with autism generally have found impaired perception versus normal controls. Such findings may correlate with impaired language and communication skills and social isolation observed among individuals with autism. Second, studies of auditory perception of pitch and music among individuals with autism generally have found enhanced perception versus normal controls. These findings may correlate with the restrictive and highly focused behaviors observed among individuals with autism. Third, findings on the auditory perception of non-linguistic, non-musical stimuli among autism patients resist any generalized conclusions. Ultimately, as some researchers have already suggested, the distinction between impaired global processing and enhanced local processing may prove useful in making sense of apparently discordant findings on auditory abnormalities among individuals with autism.