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.

Is emotional labour next to be outsourced and professionalised?
Work is hard. But we don’t always realise how hard it is or, indeed, that some forms of labour are work at all. If you stand on your feet or stare at a screen all day, you can point to bodily strain. But if a task is something more mental, the difficulty is often invisible – which can make it hard to evaluate or celebrate those who perform such tasks. Jobs defined by their cognitive contributions tend to gain attention when other forms of labour are perceived as threatened. Anxieties about being innovated out of a job or being replaced by machines tend to bring into focus those skills and states of mind that are irreducibly human. Full article.

How the dualism of Descartes ruined our mental health:
Toward the end of the Renaissance period, a radical epistemological and metaphysical shift overcame the Western psyche. The advances of Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Francis Bacon posed a serious problem for Christian dogma and its dominion over the natural world. Following Bacon’s arguments, the natural world was now to be understood solely in terms of efficient causes (ie, external effects). Any inherent meaning or purpose to the natural world (ie, its ‘formal’ or ‘final’ causes) was deemed surplus to requirements. Insofar as it could be predicted and controlled in terms of efficient causes, not only was any notion of nature beyond this conception redundant, but God too could be effectively dispensed with. Full article.

The Cognition Crisis:
ur lives on this planet have improved in so many amazing ways over the last century. On average, we are now healthier, more affluent and literate, less violent and longer living. Despite these unprecedented positive changes, clear signs exist that we are in the midst of an emerging crisis — one that has not yet been recognized in its full breadth, even though it lurks just beneath the surface of our casual conversations and swims in the undercurrents of our news feeds. This is not the well-known crisis that we’ve induced upon the earth’s climate, but one that is just as threatening to our future. This is a crisis of our minds. A cognition crisis. Full article.

Manage stress. Strengthen your support network:
Stress is a normal and unavoidable part of life — but too much stress can affect your emotional and physical wellbeing. According to APA’s 2015 Stress in America survey1, average stress levels today are slightly higher than they were in 2014. On a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is "a great deal of stress" and one is "little or no stress," American adults rated their stress level at a 5.1 today, up from 4.9 in 2014. But worrisomely, a significantly greater percentage of adults reported experiencing a stress level of 8 or higher on the 10-point scale. Twenty-four percent of American adults reported this extreme level of stress in 2015, up from 18 percent the previous year. Emotional support is an important protective factor for dealing with life’s difficulties. The 2015 survey found the average stress level for those with emotional support was 5.0 out of 10, compared to 6.3 for those without such support. Full article.

Your Brain Stops Time When You Blink:
You spend about 10 per cent of your waking hours with your eyes shut, simply because of blinking. Every few seconds, each time you blink, your retinas are deprived of visual input for a period lasting anywhere between tens to hundreds of milliseconds (500 milliseconds is equivalent to half a second). You don’t usually notice this, because your brain suppresses the dark spells and stitches together the bursts of visual information seamlessly. But these dips in visual processing in the brain do have an impact: a new study in Psychological Science finds that, in an important way, they cause your sense of the passing of time to stop temporarily. Full article.