HUMAN IMPACT INSIGHTS
The Human Impact Research Library brings together research exploring how human state shapes health, behaviour, learning, leadership, relationships and collective wellbeing.
Browse the evidence across physiology, psychology, neuroscience, contemplative science, workplace systems, education and emerging fields. Each study is translated into plain language, assessed for evidentiary strength and connected to the wider Human Impact question: what does this help us understand about the human being beneath the behaviour and the systems in operates in?
86 studies
Xu H M et al., 2026
BMC Public Health
Each one-point rise in a 12-marker allostatic load score was reported to be associated with higher mortality, most strongly for digestive and cardiovascular disease.
Cited in 1 article
Collett G et al., 2026
Annals of Internal Medicine
Which individual-level burnout intervention works depends on the professional role: coaching helped physicians, mindfulness helped nurses and midwives.
Shim H et al., 2026
Journal of Organizational Behavior
The same emotional understanding ability translated into weaker performance ratings for women than for men, and the gap was widest among supervisors who most strongly believed women are naturally more empathetic.
Balaghi M et al., 2026
Health Science Reports
The benefit of a good fit between a person and their job reached job performance entirely through two other things: the psychological resources it built, and the burnout it prevented.
Dujmić Ž et al., 2026
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Rotating-shift nurses slept measurably worse and had markedly higher morning cortisol after a night shift, but their cortisol returned to day-shift levels after two nights of rest.
Cited in 1 article
Rhodes R E et al., 2025
Health Psychology Review
Programs can increase how strongly people see themselves as the kind of person who is active, but identity shifts are smaller than the activity changes seen in the same literature.
Lainidi O et al., 2025
Psychology & Health
Employee silence was more strongly associated with burnout than employee voice was, suggesting that reducing silence matters more than increasing voice.
Cited in 2 articles
Hollaar M H L et al., 2025
BMC Public Health
Almost all resilience interventions targeted the individual worker rather than workload, staffing, leadership or job design.
Cited in 2 articles
Kim E S et al., 2025
npj Mental Health Research
Several childhood conditions were consistently associated with adult purpose and meaning across very different countries, with relationship quality and stability among the strongest.
Hao L et al., 2025
Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology
Supervisor behaviours that acknowledge and accommodate an employee's life outside work were associated with better outcomes across work, family and health domains.
Sheeran P et al., 2025
European Review of Social Psychology
Forming specific if-then plans improves thought, feeling and behaviour outcomes, especially when motivation is already high and the plan is rehearsed in contingent form.
Andreadi A et al., 2025
International Journal of Molecular Sciences
Night-shift work shifts the timing of cortisol release rather than simply raising or lowering it, producing a delayed or blunted morning rise and a flattened daily curve.
Cited in 1 article
Cogitate Consortium et al., 2025
Nature
Neither leading theory of consciousness had its core predictions confirmed, with conscious content represented in posterior regions and prefrontal activity failing to show the sustained pattern one theory predicted.
Littler J, 2025
Independently published research report (Regional Counselling Service)
Three years of systematically recorded counselling presentations from a single mining village, which is genuinely rare data. Workers presented with substantial personal loads alongside workplace concerns, most commonly relationship difficulties, anxiety and grief, and the author observes these appearing to amplify how workplace stressors were experienced.
Cited in 1 article
Calderone A et al., 2024
Biomedicines
Meditation practice is associated with measurable changes in brain structure and function, including greater cortical thickness in attention and interoception regions and reduced amygdala reactivity.
Aust B et al., 2024
International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health
Organisational changes to the job itself showed the strongest evidence for improving healthcare worker mental health, particularly for reducing burnout.
Cited in 4 articles
Singh B et al., 2024
Healthcare (Basel)
Health-related habits typically take on the order of two to five months to approach automaticity, with very large individual differences.
Ong C W et al., 2024
Behavior Therapy
Rigid, avoidant responding to difficult thoughts and feelings showed a strong negative association with wellbeing across a very wide range of countries, languages and populations.
Cited in 2 articles
Rogerson O et al., 2024
Psychoneuroendocrinology
Psychological stress-management programs produced a measurable improvement in cortisol compared with control conditions, with mindfulness and relaxation approaches showing the clearest effects.
Mehler M et al., 2024
BMC Psychology
Workplace training in emotional competencies produced moderate improvements that persisted beyond three months, with teachers, health professionals and managers all benefiting equally.
Cited in 2 articles
Grossman P, 2023
Biological Psychology
Each of the five core premises of polyvagal theory is argued to be untenable or highly implausible given the comparative physiology literature.
Han A & Kim T H, 2023
Mindfulness
Self-compassion programs reduce depression, anxiety and stress relative to controls overall, but the advantage shrinks or disappears against active comparison treatments.
Ma H et al., 2023
International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity
Interventions designed to build physical activity habits produce a small-to-moderate increase in self-reported habit strength compared with controls, with larger effects at shorter follow-up.
Heim N et al., 2023
Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences
Interventions designed to improve body awareness did improve interoception in most trials, while their effect on the mental health symptoms they targeted was less consistent.
Fincham G W et al., 2023
Scientific Reports
Breathwork was associated with modestly lower self-reported stress than control conditions, with similar small-to-medium effects for anxiety and low mood.
Monroy M & Keltner D, 2023
Perspectives on Psychological Science
Awe is proposed to influence health through five interconnected pathways: shifts in neurophysiology, reduced self-focus, increased prosocial behaviour, greater social integration and a heightened sense of meaning.
Pothos E M & Busemeyer J R, 2022
Annual Review of Psychology
Quantum probability theory provides unified mathematical explanations for well-documented quirks of human judgement, including the conjunction fallacy, question-order effects and interference between judgements, often outperforming classical probability models.
World Health Organization, 2022
World Health Organization
WHO recommends organisational interventions to reduce psychosocial risks, manager training for mental health, and selected individual interventions, with organisational change prioritised for prevention.
Cited in 1 article
Greiner B A et al., 2022
PLoS ONE
Evidence for organisational-level mental health interventions in construction is limited and methodologically weak, with no robust effects demonstrated.
Cited in 2 articles
Knotts K et al., 2022
European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology
Self-leadership was strongly related to individual outcomes, with the relationship stronger for creativity and innovation than for task performance, and stronger when people used cognitive strategies alongside behavioural ones.
Cited in 2 articles
Guidi J et al., 2021
Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics
Higher allostatic load was consistently associated with poorer physical and mental health outcomes, and the authors recommend pairing biological markers with structured clinical assessment rather than using biomarkers alone.
Cited in 1 article
Korneeva Y & Simonova N, 2020
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Stress fell through the first half of a rotation as workers settled into the job, then rose again toward the end, which the authors attribute to depleted internal resources and accumulated fatigue rather than to the work itself changing.
Cited in 1 article
Steptoe A & Fancourt D, 2020
Scientific Reports
Increases in how meaningful people found their lives were associated in both directions with better health, more positive emotional states, healthier behaviours and stronger social engagement.
Sheeran P et al., 2020
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
Self-determination theory interventions produce small average improvements in health behaviours, partly by raising autonomous motivation and perceived competence.
Cited in 1 article
MacCann C et al., 2020
Psychological Bulletin
Emotional intelligence was modestly associated with academic performance, more strongly for ability-based measures, and remained a secondary predictor after intelligence and conscientiousness.
van Elk M et al., 2019
Human Brain Mapping
Brain regions associated with self-referential thought were less engaged while people watched awe-inducing footage than the immersive viewing condition would otherwise produce, alongside increased activity in attention-related networks.
Carey R N et al., 2019
Annals of Behavioral Medicine
Published interventions repeatedly link specific techniques to psychological mechanisms, especially beliefs about capabilities and intention, but almost none of those links were empirically tested inside the same papers.
Rhodes R E et al., 2019
Health Psychology Review
Interventions can make people feel more positively about physical activity, and those emotional shifts predict increases in activity behaviour.
Cited in 1 article
Mattingly V & Kraiger K, 2019
Human Resource Management Review
Formal emotional intelligence training produced a moderate improvement in emotional intelligence scores across both pre-post and controlled designs.
Cited in 2 articles
Feijó F R et al., 2019
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Organisational and psychosocial factors, not individual personality, were the most consistent risk factors for workplace bullying.
Cited in 1 article
Schumacher S et al., 2019
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
Adults with PTSD showed modestly lower cortisol than controls, not higher, and a weaker cortisol rise after waking.
Johnson R C et al., 2019
Journal of Vocational Behavior
When difficulties at home spilled into work, they related to safety behaviour through cognitive failures at work, and that pathway was weaker among workers strongly committed to safety.
Cited in 1 article
Gardner B et al., 2018
BMJ Open
Workers and partners described living in two separate worlds requiring different versions of themselves, with the transition between them a recurring source of strain, and both groups felt organisational support was tokenistic or unsafe to use.
Cited in 1 article
Joyce S et al., 2018
BMJ Open
Resilience training produced a moderate positive effect on measured psychological resilience, with cognitive behavioural, mindfulness-based and combined programs all showing benefit.
de Wit S et al., 2018
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Extensive training did not reliably shift healthy humans from goal-directed action to inflexible habit on several standard laboratory tasks, including failed replications of a key prior demonstration.
James C et al., 2018
PLOS ONE
Moderate to very high psychological distress was substantially more common among remote mine workers than in the general Australian population, and was associated with a mix of personal, health and workplace factors.
Cited in 1 article
Bowers J et al., 2018
Medical Journal of Australia
High or very high psychological distress was far more common than in the general population, and by a wide margin the strongest association was with stress about the stigma of mental health problems.
Cited in 1 article
Marsland A L et al., 2017
Brain, Behavior, and Immunity
A short, purely psychological stressor produced measurable increases in several inflammatory signalling molecules in healthy people within an hour or two.
Bakker A B & Demerouti E, 2017
Journal of Occupational Health Psychology
Job demands cost energy and drive strain, while job resources build engagement and can buffer demands, via two distinct pathways with feedback loops over time.
Cited in 2 articles
Arnold K A, 2017
Journal of Occupational Health Psychology
Transformational leadership generally predicted higher wellbeing and lower ill-being, often indirectly through mediators, but stronger causal designs remain limited.
Cited in 1 article
Miao C et al., 2017
Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology
How emotional intelligence is measured changes how strongly it relates to work attitudes, with self-report and mixed measures predicting satisfaction, commitment and intention to leave far more strongly than ability tests do.
Murray J M et al., 2017
Social Science & Medicine
Physical activity interventions help adults stay more active than controls through about 6 to 15 months, with effects shrinking over time and little reliable evidence beyond 15 months.
Frazier M L et al., 2017
Personnel Psychology
Psychological safety was positively associated with task performance, learning behaviour, information sharing, engagement and commitment, with leadership quality and supportive work context as the strongest antecedents.
Cited in 2 articles
Goessl V C et al., 2017
Psychological Medicine
Heart rate variability biofeedback was associated with a large reduction in self-reported stress and anxiety.
Hughes K et al., 2017
The Lancet Public Health
Adults reporting four or more adverse childhood experiences had elevated risk across all 23 health outcomes examined.
Williams D M & Rhodes R E, 2016
Health Psychology Review
Standard self-efficacy questionnaires often capture motivation and expected outcomes as well as perceived capability, so large self-efficacy to behaviour correlations can overstate the unique power of confidence.
Cited in 1 article
Kwasnicka D et al., 2016
Health Psychology Review
Theories of lasting behaviour change converge on five interconnected themes: maintenance motives, self-regulation, resources, habits, and environmental and social influences.
West C P et al., 2016
The Lancet
Both individual-focused and organisational or structural strategies produced meaningful reductions in physician burnout.
Cited in 1 article
Hagger M S et al., 2016
Perspectives on Psychological Science
A coordinated replication across 23 laboratories found the ego-depletion effect to be near zero, with confidence intervals encompassing no effect at all.
Shields G S et al., 2016
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
Acute stress does not impair thinking uniformly: it disrupts working memory and cognitive flexibility while leaving or even sharpening some inhibitory control.
Cited in 1 article
Garfinkel S N et al., 2015
Biological Psychology
Body awareness separates into three distinct dimensions that do not necessarily align: objective accuracy at detecting internal signals, subjective belief about that ability, and metacognitive insight into whether one is right.
Cited in 2 articles
Shanafelt T D et al., 2015
Mayo Clinic Proceedings
Supervisor leadership scores were strongly and gradedly associated with lower physician burnout and higher satisfaction.
Cited in 1 article
A-Tjak J G L et al., 2015
Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics
Acceptance and commitment therapy outperformed waitlist, psychological placebo and treatment as usual across a range of mental and physical health conditions.
Cited in 2 articles
Goncalves J P B et al., 2015
Psychological Medicine
Religious and spiritual interventions showed significant benefits for anxiety, with less consistent effects on depression, while distance and intercessory prayer protocols were assessed separately and not found to be reliably effective.
Bolier L et al., 2013
BMC Public Health
Positive psychology exercises produced small but statistically significant improvements in wellbeing and depressive symptoms, partly sustained at three to six months.
Lundahl B et al., 2013
Patient Education and Counseling
Motivational interviewing in medical care improves the odds of favourable health-related outcomes compared with usual care or weak controls, across diverse clinical targets.
Cited in 1 article
Maynard D C & Parfyonova N M, 2013
Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology
Workers who felt overqualified were more likely to search for other work and to leave, with job attitudes carrying the effect and work values shaping how strongly it operated.
Lambert N et al., 2013
Nature Physics
Reviews the two most-studied candidates for functional quantum effects in living systems, photosynthetic light harvesting and avian magnetoreception, while noting unresolved questions about their significance at biological temperatures.
Thayer J F et al., 2012
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
Heart rate variability was consistently associated with activity in the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, supporting its use as an index of brain-based regulation of the body.
Koenig H G, 2012
ISRN Psychiatry (now International Scholarly Research Notices)
Most published studies report positive associations between religious or spiritual involvement and better mental health, with weaker and more mixed associations for physical health, though causal direction remains unresolved.
Sturt J et al., 2012
British Journal of General Practice
There is little reliable experimental evidence that neurolinguistic programming improves health outcomes.
Burrus J et al., 2012
Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being
People who performed better on a test of managing emotions in realistic situations reported substantially higher psychological wellbeing, and experienced more positive and fewer negative moments through their day.
Kivimäki M et al., 2012
The Lancet
Job strain, meaning high demands combined with little control over how the work is done, was associated with a modest but real increase in the risk of coronary heart disease.
Freund P A & Kasten N, 2012
Psychological Bulletin
People's estimates of their own cognitive ability correlate only moderately with their measured ability, leaving a substantial gap between self-perception and performance.
Cited in 2 articles
Webb T L et al., 2012
Psychological Bulletin
The specific technique mattered far more than the broad category: reappraising a situation and taking another perspective worked, while concentrating on a feeling made things worse.
Cited in 3 articles
Nahrgang J D et al., 2011
Journal of Applied Psychology
Job demands drove burnout and job resources drove engagement, and both pathways led to safety outcomes including adverse events, accidents and injuries.
Cited in 1 article
O'Boyle E H et al., 2011
Journal of Organizational Behavior
Across ability, self-report and mixed measurement traditions, emotional intelligence showed a modest positive association with job performance and retained relative importance alongside cognitive ability and personality.
Cited in 1 article
Moffitt T E et al., 2011
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Childhood self-control predicted adult physical health, substance dependence, personal finances and criminal offending along a graded scale, and the effect survived comparison between siblings raised in the same family.
Amstad F T et al., 2011
Journal of Occupational Health Psychology
Conflict ran in both directions between work and family, and each was more strongly associated with outcomes in the domain being interfered with than in the domain it came from.
Cited in 1 article
Hall G B et al., 2010
International Journal of Stress Management
The PSC-12 provides a reliable, multidimensional brief measure of organisational policies, practices and procedures for worker psychological health and safety.
Cited in 1 article
Dollard M F & Bakker A B, 2010
Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology
School-level psychosocial safety climate predicted lower work pressure and emotional demands and, through those pathways, lower psychological distress and emotional exhaustion at 12 months.
Cited in 2 articles
Joseph D L & Newman D A, 2010
Journal of Applied Psychology
Emotional skills appear to build in sequence, from noticing emotion to understanding it to managing it, and that sequence only reliably helps performance in jobs where handling other people's feelings is central to the work.
Cited in 2 articles
Lally P et al., 2010
European Journal of Social Psychology
When people repeat a simple behaviour in the same context, self-reported automaticity rises along a curve that levels off, and the time to approach that plateau varies enormously between individuals.
Luders E et al., 2009
NeuroImage
Long-term meditators showed larger grey matter volume in the right orbitofrontal cortex and the right hippocampus than matched controls.
Miller G E et al., 2007
Psychological Bulletin
Cortisol output rises shortly after a chronic stressor begins and declines as time passes, with a high, flat daily pattern typical of stressors involving trauma, threat to physical integrity or uncontrollability.
Cited in 1 article
Edmondson A, 1999
Administrative Science Quarterly
Team psychological safety predicted team learning behaviour, and learning behaviour mediated the path from psychological safety to team performance.
Cited in 1 article
Research
Littler J
Independently published research report (Regional Counselling Service) · 2025 · Practitioner observational report
A practitioner report, not peer reviewed. Included for the language and lived detail it provides rather than as evidence of effect.
Study population
Key finding
Three years of systematically recorded counselling presentations from a single mining village, which is genuinely rare data. Workers presented with substantial personal loads alongside workplace concerns, most commonly relationship difficulties, anxiety and grief, and the author observes these appearing to amplify how workplace stressors were experienced.
The numbers
In plain language
Why it matters
Limitations
This is a practitioner observation not peer-reviewed research. There is no control or comparison group, no inter-rater reliability, and the categories were developed with site management. Counts are of presentations rather than people, so a single person in prolonged difficulty may account for many entries. Only those who sought counselling appear, so the sample self-selects.
Associated articles
Why human state belongs in the psychosocial safety conversation
10 min read
Cited for:
“Across three years of on-site counselling at one Western Australian mine, the data included 1,193 personal issue presentations and 1,042 workplace concerns; communication was the most frequently raised workplace concern, alongside workload, lack of support, conflict and career uncertainty. Also supports: Littler describes an amplification effect, where reduced personal capacity meeting an existing workplace stressor may produce a response exceeding what either factor would produce in isolation.”
