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

Spot the psychopath:
Psychopath. The word conjures up the image of a cold-blooded killer, or perhaps a fiendishly clever but heartless egoist. There’s Ted Bundy, who in the 1970s abducted women, killed them, and had sex with their decomposing bodies. Or Hannibal Lecter from the film The Silence of the Lambs (1991), who cunningly escaped his various confinements and ended up eating the people he despised. In the popular imagination, psychopaths are the incarnation of evil. However, for an increasing number of researchers, such people are ill, not evil – victims of their own deranged minds. So just what are psychopaths, and what is wrong with them? Full article.


LinkedIn profiles that get noticed:
With nearly 600 million users in 200 countries, LinkedIn has become the world’s most widely used resource for professional networking. Last year, 77% of recruiters used the website to find job candidates, according to a Jobvite survey of 805 recruiters nationwide. "If you’re not on LinkedIn, you are invisible to recruiters," says Laura Viehmyer, who has more than 35 years of experience as a human resources executive and now runs Viehmyer Consulting Group, a private résumé and career counseling practice. "Don’t underestimate the importance of this tool."  Full article.

 

 

What’s the Upside of Feeling Insecure?
Show me someone completely devoid of insecure feelings and I’ll show you a pathological narcissist, hijacked by such defense mechanisms as denial, displacement, projection, and repression. To whatever degree, we all start out in life as insecure. And remnants of this insecurity remain even after we become adults.  Consider that as children there’s so much we can’t yet do, haven’t yet learned, don’t yet understand. And so, if we're to get by on a daily basis,  we must depend on our family. That outward reliance gradually dissipates as we get older; develop our physical, mental, and emotional resources; and demonstrate an ever-increasing ability to function independently. Nonetheless, perhaps because we can never know everything and the world presents us with so many moving targets, a certain amount of humility about our capability (i.e., insecurity) is in order—vs. an overconfident, “know it all” attitude.  Full article.

Online brain games can extend in-game 'cognitive youth' into old age:
A University of California, Irvine-led study has found that online brain game exercises can enable people in their 70s and even 80s to multitask cognitively as well as individuals 50 years their junior. This is an increasingly valuable skill, given today's daily information onslaught, which can divide attention and be particularly taxing for older adults. "The brain is not a muscle, but like our bodies, if we work out and train it, we can improve our mental performance," said lead author Mark Steyvers, a UCI professor of cognitive sciences. "We discovered that people in the upper age ranges who completed specific training tasks were able to beef up their brain's ability to switch between tasks in the game at a level similar to untrained 20- and 30-year-olds." Full article.