Stressed workers could improve their problem-solving skills by taking a few minutes at the start of the day to write a note about something important to them, a study suggests.

一项研究表明，压力大的工作者可以在开始工作之前抽出几分钟时间写纸条，记下对他们来说重要的事情，以帮助他们提高解决问题的技能。

Writing a short essay about the importance of friends and family, for example, can counteract the damaging effects of chronic stress on our ability to complete tasks, researchers found.

研究者发现，通过写下诸如朋友和家庭重要性的短文，能帮助我们对抗长期压力带来的负面结果，以完成手中的任务。

Highly stressed people performed almost 50 per cent worse on a problem-solving test than a low-stressed group, but their scores caught up after carrying out the writing task.

压力大的人群在解决问题的测验中的表现要比压力小的人差50%，但如果他们先完成写字任务，表现则会好很多。

Previous studies have shown that stress can harm our ability to solve problems, but the simple exercise could help chronically stressed workers improve their creativity and insight, and boost the performance of underachieving school pupils, researchers said.

研究者说，之前的研究已经证明压力会影响我们解决问题的能力，但这个（写字）练习则能帮助压力大的员工提升创造力和洞察力，同时提高那些表现不佳的小学生的成绩。

The researchers asked 73 students to rank 11 values, including relationships with friends and family, politics and music, in order of how important each was to them.

研究者们让73名学生根据对自己的重要性给11项价值标准排序，这些标准包括与朋友和家人的关系，政治与音乐等。

One group of participants then wrote an essay about why the top entry on their list mattered to them, while the "control" group wrote about why one of their lowest-ranked values might be important to someone else.

其中一组参与者随后写一篇短文，描述为什么排在前面的标准对他们自己很重要，另一个对照组则写一篇短文，说明为什么他们排在后面的标准可能对其他人来说很重要。

All participants then completed a problem-solving word game. In the control group, those who reported the highest levels of stress over the past month scored almost 50 per cent lower than those with the lowest stress levels.

然后所有参与者完成一项解决问题式的文字游戏。在对照组中，那些在过去一个月压力的成员们比压力最小的成员们分数低了50%。

But chronically stressed people who had written about something which was important to them before completing the test scored just as highly as low-stressed participants.

但是，如果那些有长期压力的人们在完成文字游戏测试前先写下一些对他们来说很重要的东西，测试分数就和那些压力较小的成员们一样。

Writing in the Public Library of Science ONE journal, the psychologists from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh said the activity could "buffer the negative effects of chronic stress on task performance".

本次研究结果发表在《公共科学图书馆-综合》期刊上，该文作者，来自匹兹堡卡内基梅隆大学的心理学家表示，写字活动能“缓冲工作中长期压力带来的负面效应”。