HIGHER-STATUS PEOPLE ARE MORE LIKELY TO WHINE

Higher-status people are more likely to whine

Workers With Better Education And Income More Stressed & Less Happy Than Lower-Income Ones: Study

Money and education confer plenty of ad vantages in life, and re search has long shown that people who have them live healthier, longer lives and tend to have more stable, lessmonotonous jobs. But they also report feeling a lot more stress at work than people with lower salaries and fewer degrees, a recent study found.

To measure stress levels during the work day , Penn State University researchers gave 122 workers living in a northeast US city Palm Pilots to carry with them on the job.Several times a day , the handheld computers prompted them to rate how stressed and how happy they felt. The idea was to measure stress in real time, rather than ask people at the end of the day , when other factors such as commutes or family obligations might influence their stress levels.

People with higher incomes and levels of education reported being about 28% more stressed and 8.3% less happy overall than workers with lower incomes and levels of education did, according to Matthew Zawadzki, now a professor at University of California-Merced, who wrote the study with Penn State professors Sarah Damaske and Joshua Smyth.

In addition to reporting be ing more stressed and less happy from moment to moment, those higher-status workers -that is, those in the top fifth of a combined measure of income and education, tending to earn at least $100,000 (approx. Rs 66.85 lakh, as on Wednesday) a year -also reported having more trouble meeting the demands of their jobs.

“These individuals who report higher stress are probably individuals who simply have more authority or decision-making duties than oth ers,“ said University of Toronto sociology professor Scott Schieman, who was not involved in the study but called it “important“ research.

The study's results certain ly don't mean low-status workers have it easier. Obviously , low-status jobs can create all sorts of problems for workers, such as making it more difficult for them to pay bills.“Even though that's caused by work, maybe it's a stressor you can leave behind for the moment when you get to work,“ said Damaske. She and her coauthors found in a 2014 study that people with lower incomes tended to report more stress at home than at work the opposite of what higher-income people reported.

Stress and happiness are also pretty subjective feelings, and people express their moods and deal with stress in different ways. Could it be that higher-status people are just more likely to whine when things don't go their way?

More research is needed, Damaske said, but the study contains a clue: In addition to answering questions, the subjects also submitted saliva so her team could measure their levels of the stress-related hormone, cortisol -and those levels didn't indicate significantly more stress among betterpaid workers.

 (toi)