Welcome to the Weekly Medius PsychNews. Every week, we select five thought-provoking Psychology articles from the hundreds published in journals and other media. Psychology Drives Everything.

 

 Is the Robot Psychologist the Next Big AI App? 
Mention the phrase “robot psychologist” and meme-worthy images of automatons or perhaps human-like robot hosts fictionalized by HBO’s Westworld may come to mind. Yet part of what practicing psychologists do, such as administering certain types of psychological tests, assessments, and questionnaires, can be automated — the technical capabilities exist today. And the technology is growing exponentially more sophisticated. For example, researchers at MIT have created an artificial neural network computer model that can detect depression from natural conversation [1]. Will robot psychologists be commonplace one day? Is this even a good idea? Full article.
Facing Uncertainty Without Slamming the Panic Button:
This morning I awoke feeling uncertain about the direction my life was taking. Was it what I wanted in all areas? Was I right to be living where I wanted to, in London, away from family? Was I doing the “right thing” restructuring my business, and was I doing the “right thing” going away for two months next year? I’ve had a few days like this recently, and while I’d like to blame it on my external circumstances, I know differently. I’m simply feeling stuck in thought. I learned this in what I perceive as “the hard way.” Full article.
  Is sleeping too much bad for your brain?

The largest sleep study ever concludes that sleeping too little or too much has a negative impact on our cognitive ability, but not on our short-term memory. How does sleep duration impact our ability to think? As years of research mount up, we are steadily improving our understanding of sleep. However, despite making up around one third of our entire lives, sleep still holds many mysteries. The strains of modern life often mean that we sleep less than we might like. Full article.

High-Risk Shortcut Behaviors at Work:
Tight deadlines and multiple competing demands are a fact of life for many workers. Therefore, it is perhaps not surprising that individuals sometimes look for ways to take shortcuts at work. Specifically, shortcut behaviors are methods of accomplishing tasks that are faster than standard or typical procedures. Although some shortcuts are relatively harmless, others can have adverse or even disastrous consequences. For instance, workers took several shortcuts prior to the Deepwater Horizon oil platform explosion. As deadlines loomed, numerous steps in the drilling process were replaced with faster alternatives, and some procedures were skipped outright (Reader & O’Connor, 2014). The result was one of the largest man-made disasters in history. Full article.
Why Do We Emotionally Need ” Small Talk”?
There is nothing small about “small talk.” Defined as polite conversation about unimportant or uncontroversial matters, especially used on social occasions, small talk has often been seen in a pejorative or dismissive way. Actually, small talk has a much broader meaning. Whether we love it or dread it, whether it serves us as a “ tool or trait,” we use “small talk” for meeting important psychological needs. We use it to make connections, to regulate anxiety and to facilitate the interplay between these two necessary functions. Full article.