/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Attractive ‘cruel’ people bully ugly colleagues

>People who are considered unattractive are more likely to be belittled and bullied in the workplace, according to new research. The study by Michigan State University found that unattractive workers were treated more harshly than their attractive colleagues when it came to promotions and which tasks they were given to do.
And that being ‘ugly’ played more of a role in how someone is treated than their age, gender or how long they had worked there.

>Previous research has found that attractive students tend to be more popular in school. However, this study, led by associate professor of management at the University Brent Scott, is the first to find a direct correlation between attractiveness and bullying in the workplace.‘Frankly, it’s an ugly finding,’ said Scott.
‘Although we like to think we’re professional and mature in the workplace, it can be just like high school in many ways.’

>The researchers surveyed 114 workers at a health care facility in the southeastern United States.The workers were each asked how often their colleagues ‘engaged in cruel behaviour’ towards them.

>This cruel behaviour included saying hurtful things, acting rudely and making fun of them. A separate group of people, who didn’t know any of study participants, were each shown photos of the workers and asked to judge how attractive each of them were. Workers that were rated as unattractive were treated much more harshly than those the separate group classed as attractive.

>This included being given menial tasks or jobs other people didn’t want to do and being overlooked for promotion.And this was the case even when other key factors were taken into account, including age, gender and how long they had worked at the health care facility.

Autistic children may find the human voice unpleasant, researchers say

>A new brain-imaging study from Stanford University might explain why autistic children have difficulty with verbal communication: they may not derive pleasure from the human voice.

>Daniel Abrams, lead researcher of the study, found that those with autism showed weaker connections between the brain’s voice-processing areas and its “reward” centers, suggesting that children with autism do not get the same pleasure from the human voice as most developing children.

>In speech, we not only convey information, we also convey emotion and social cues. It’s long been known that autism is associated with difficulty reading those cues, and that those with more severe autism may be completely indifferent to the human voice.

>There are competing theories on why this is. One theory involves problems in the brain’s sound processing, while another theory is that social cues, including speech, don’t hit the brain’s reward system as expected. The results of this theory lend credence to the latter.

>These findings were derived using functional MRI, which allowed researchers to measure brain activity by watching changes in blood flow.

>Twenty “high-functioning” autistic children, averaging 10 years old were scanned, while another 19 children without autism within the same age and IQ range were scanned as a control group.

>The results showed children with autism having a weaker connection between the area of the brain that responds to the human voice and brain regions that release the dopamine in response to rewards. There was also a weaker link between the brain’s voice processors and the brain region involved in emotion.