Reuters

Cutest. Motivation. Tools. Ever. Researchers in Japan have found that looking at pictures of cute things helped people perform their jobs faster.

Forget PowerPoint: It turns out the secret to improving productivity at your job might be puppies.

A new study out of Hiroshima University found that people performed a variety of tasks faster or more accurately after looking at pictures of kittens and puppies. These test subjects also beat out others who looked at pictures of adult animals or gourmet meals instead.

"Viewing cute images improved performance on tasks that required carefulness," researchers concluded. 

Earlier experiments found that people did a better job playing the game Operation after viewing photos of puppies and kittens. Researchers speculated that the cute images made subjects more attuned to being careful because baby animals suggest vulnerability.

"The perception of something as cute activates the idea of something delicate and breakable... valuable and worth caring for," said Gary Sherman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and one of the authors of that earlier research.

The Hiroshima study, titled The Power of Kawaii (kawaii roughly translates to cute) found that the "cute factor" helped people performing other detail-oriented tasks, not just those involving fine motor skills.

So go ahead and hang that poster of a puppy asleep on a shoe in your cubicle. "If people had the inclination to surround themselves with cuteness in the office, I wouldn't discourage that," Sherman said.

"Cute objects may be used as an emotion elicitor to induce careful behavioral tendencies in specific situations, such as driving and office work," the study said.

The effect "seems to be more generalized" beyond only fine motor skills, Sherman said. "That does extend the domains and types of tasks that could be impacted."

This means anyone who has to do work that requires careful attention, such as copyediting or accounting, could benefit. So the next time your boss catches you perusing CuteOverload.com, tell them what looks like a kitten in a basket is really a performance-optimizing tool. 

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By MyHealthNewsDaily staff

If your job is a literal pain in the neck, drinking coffee may help, a new study from Norway says.

People who drank coffee before sitting down to work at a computer for 90 minutes reported less pain in their necks and shoulders than those who didn't drink coffee, according to the study. Some in the study had previously suffered chronic neck and shoulder pain, while other participants hadn't — but people in both groups who drank coffee reported less pain, the researchers said.

Among people whose daily work involves low levels of muscle activity, such as sitting at a computer all day, about 10 percent report shoulder and neck pain, according to the study.

The researchers looked at 48 people, including 22 with chronic neck or shoulder pain, and 26 healthy people. The experiment was part of research on how pain develops during office work; it was not  intended to look at the effects of caffeine, the researchers said.

People in the study reported to the laboratory first thing in the morning, so to offset any effects of sleepiness, coffee and tea were available. Nineteen of the study participants chose to drink coffee, but were instructed not to drink more than one cup. 

Then, for 90 minutes, participants performed a computer task, using only a mouse.

Researchers found that people who drank coffee — whether they had previous chronic pain or not — developed less pain over the course of the 90 minutes, compared with those who didn't drink coffee. And at the end of the computer task, the coffee drinkers rated their pain as less intense than the other study participants. 

It's possible the reduction in pain experienced by coffee drinkers in the study was due to other traits or lifestyle behaviors common to people in this group. Future studies should be conducted in which participants are randomly assigned to consume caffeine or not in order to better understand whether the caffeine itself is truly reducing pain, the researchers said.

The study, conducted by researchers at the Sunnaas Rehabilitation Hospital in Norway, was published Sept. 3 in the journal BMC Research Notes.

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