Publications

03 Nov 2022
Op-Ed

Feeling Separation Anxiety at Your Startup? 5 Tips to Soothe These Growing Pains

You’re the founder of a growing startup and it seems like just yesterday that you were a team of five, sharing a co-working space with one table and five chairs. There was an open flow of communication in the room and unless someone’s headphones were on to signal they... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

August 8, 2024
Article

How to Build a Life: The Best Therapy for Our Anxiety Epidemic

By: Arthur C. Brooks

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April 2015
Article

Anxious and Egocentric: How Specific Emotions Influence Perspective Taking

By: Andrew R. Todd, Matthias Forstmann, Pascal Burgmer, Alison Wood Brooks and Adam D. Galinsky

People frequently feel anxious. Although prior research has extensively studied how feeling anxious shapes intrapsychic aspects of cognition, much less is known about how anxiety affects interpersonal aspects of cognition. Here, we examine the influence of incidental... View Details

Keywords: Anxiety; Egocentrism; Emotion; Perspective Taking; Risk and Uncertainty; Perspective; Emotions

2013
Working Paper

Worry at Work: How Anxiety Can Energize, Direct, and Sustain Effort in the Workplace

By: E.E. Levine, A.W. Brooks and M.E. Schweitzer

June 2020
Article

Air Pollution, State Anxiety, and Unethical Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Review

By: J Lu, J. Lee, F. Gino and A. Galinsky

Lu, Lee, Gino, and Galinsky (2018) reported four studies demonstrating that air pollution predicted unethical behavior and that one mediating mechanism was state anxiety. In contrast, Heck and colleagues reported two null-effect studies on air pollution, trait... View Details

Keywords: State Anxiety; Pollution; Behavior; Moral Sensibility; Analysis

November 14, 2024
Article

How to Build a Life: The Secret to Thinking Your Way Out of Anxiety

By: Arthur C. Brooks

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2024
Working Paper

“If You’re Not There… You’re Not There”: How Art Market Platforms Induce Status Anxiety to Coerce Participation

By: James Riley and Ezra Zuckerman Sivan

This paper, an 18-month ethnographic investigation of international art fairs (IAFs), shows how market platforms can have a coercive effect, inducing sellers (i.e., art galleries) to participate despite ambivalence over their value and anxiety over the process by which... View Details

Keywords: Market Participation; Status and Position; Competition; Demand and Consumers; Fine Arts Industry

23 Dec 2013
News

Getting Excited Helps with Performance Anxiety More Than Trying to Calm Down, Study Finds

Article

What Is Your Status Portfolio? Higher Status Variance across Groups Increases Interpersonal Helping but Decreases Intrapersonal Well-being

By: Catarina R. Fernandes, Siyu Yu, Taeya M. Howell, Alison Wood Brooks, Gavin J. Kilduff and Nathan C. Pettit

Individuals belong to multiple groups across various domains of life, which in aggregate constitute a portfolio of potentially distinct levels of experienced status. We propose a two-factor model for assessing the effects of an individual’s status portfolio, based on... View Details

Keywords: Status; Social Hierarchies; Helping; Perspective Taking; Anxiety; Status and Position; Groups and Teams; Perspective; Well-being

December 2018
Article

Improving Resilience Among Employees High in Depression, Anxiety, and Workplace Distress

By: Allison L. Williams, Acacia C. Parks, Grace Cormier, Julia Stafford and A.V. Whillans

Depression and anxiety are costly for both employees and employers, in terms of direct medical costs as well as costs stemming from lost productive time and missed days at work. Resilience training has been shown to improve workplace functioning for employees, which... View Details

Keywords: Depression; Anxiety; Engagement; Resilience; Presenteeism; Employee Engagement; Mental Health; Employees; Emotions; Health; Internet and the Web; Performance Productivity

Research Summary

Overview

By: Alison Wood Brooks

Professor Brooks studies the psychology of conversation and emotion—topics at the intersection of how people think, feel, and interact. From pitching ideas to seeking advice, from asking questions to giving compliments, from talking about (or hiding) our feelings and... View Details

Keywords: Anxiety; Emotion; Emotion Regulation; Reappraisal; Negotiation; Trust; Performance

14 Jun 2021
News

When Your Nerves Get the Best of You, Change the Narrative

23 Oct 2013
Research & Ideas

Overcoming Nervous Nelly

danger of failing before, now your anxiety has made failure a foregone conclusion. We've all experienced the crippling effects of job performance anxiety. But far from being uniquely relegated to nightmare scenarios like the one outlined... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

25 Sep 2019
News

Don’t Stop Believin’

29 Jun 2016
Research & Ideas

The $1 Trillion Link Between Mental Health and Economic Productivity

In April, the World Health Organization released a groundbreaking study that established a definitive link between mental health and economic productivity. The findings were both depressing and hopeful. On the downside, depression and View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

12 Feb 2018
Research & Ideas

Customers at the Back of the Line Are Anxious—Can You Keep Them from Leaving?

line has an end and there is an identifiable person who occupies it,” says Buell. “They know they’re last and everyone around them knows it as well.” The anxiety we feel about being last can affect how consumers experience waiting for a... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail; Service

March 2012
Article

Anxiety, Advice, and the Ability to Discern: Feeling Anxious Motivates Individuals to Seek and Use Advice

By: F. Gino, A.W. Brooks and M.E. Schweitzer

Across eight experiments, we describe the influence of anxiety on advice seeking and advice taking. We find that anxious individuals are more likely to seek and rely on advice than are those in a neutral emotional state (Experiment 1), but this pattern of results does... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives