![]() Harvard study, almost 80 years old, has proved that embracing community helps us live longer, and be happier Comedian George Burns once described love as something like a backache: “It doesn’t show up on X-rays, but you know it’s there.” Though not normally considered an intestinal ailment, love is often described as an illness, and the smitten as lovesick. One database of scientific publications turns up more than 6,600 pages of results in a search for the word “love.” The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is conducting 18 clinical trials on it (though, like love itself, NIH’s “love” can have layered meanings, including as an acronym for a study of Crohn’s disease). But the field is gamely racing to catch up. ![]() When it comes to thinking deeply about love, poets, philosophers, and even high school boys gazing dreamily at girls two rows over have a significant head start on science. Yet the two do meet, whether in lab tests for surging hormones or in austere chambers where MRI scanners noisily thunk and peer into brains that ignite at glimpses of their soulmates. Love’s warm squishiness seems a thing far removed from the cold, hard reality of science. There could be some overlap here, of course - you can have a positive attitude toward your job but also experience “elevated job demands and felt stress.” But a key, obvious takeaway from all this is that if you want workers to do the right thing and stay home when they’re sick, it would be best to downplay the possibility that they’ll be somehow punished for doing so.“They gave each other a smile with a future in it.” The former group probably would stay home if they felt like they could you couldn’t drag the latter away from the office if you tried. That last one is interesting, since it’s different from and more positive than all of the others, and it suggests two very different types of people are likely to drag themselves into work despite being under the weather: people who feel vulnerable as a result of financial stress, chronic illness, or other factors, and those who actually like and are really engaged by their job, making it hard for them to stay away. They discovered that the variables correlated with presenteeism “included general ill health, constraints on absenteeism (e.g., strict absence policies, job insecurity), elevated job demands and felt stress, lack of job and personal resources (e.g., low support and low optimism), negative relational experiences (e.g., perceived discrimination), and positive attitudes (satisfaction, engagement, commitment)”. The duo conducted a meta-analysis of past studies about presenteeism constituting a total sample of 175,965, and then applied various bits of statistical trickery to try to figure out what’s going on. To better understand presenteeism, doctors Mariella Miraglia of the University of East Anglia and Gary Johns of Concordia University just published a paper in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (that’s a link to a press release since there isn’t yet a working link to the paper itself up). ![]() Researchers are curious about which pressures lead people to do this, since there are obvious ramifications both for public health (especially during periods like flu season) and for firms getting the most out of their workers. Then there’s the third, murky category researchers called “presenteeism” - coming to work even though you’re sick and therefore not likely to be particularly productive. During a given day at the office, some people are their normal work-selves, typing away productively (well, arguably), while other people are home sick.
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