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.

 

 Acting like an extravert has benefits, but not for introverts:
For decades, personality psychologists have noticed a striking, consistent pattern: extraverts are happier more of the time than introverts. For anyone interested in promoting wellbeing, this has raised the question of whether it might be beneficial to encourage people to act more extraverted. Evidence to date has suggested it might. Full article.


Thinking Uses Your Brain's Navigation System, New Report:
Think of a pink elephant riding a scooter. If your brain were scanned right now, neuroscientists would see a region of your spongy think organ lighting up. What they wouldn’t see is a pink elephant riding a scooter. A thought in a brain scan is very different than your experience of thinking. The chasm between the brain (grey matter) and the mind (thinking) is one of the biggest scientific mysteries. It’s a problem that has stymied neuroscientists, computer scientists, philosophers and physicists. Full article. It's one of the classic management challenges: One day you were an employee and one of the group, and the next day you're promoted into management and have authority over the group. How do you handle it? How do you balance the need to exert managerial authority with the desire to maintain the friendships and positive relationships you've developed? It's almost always a delicate situation. There's no magic formula for success, but there are a few general guidelines to keep in mind.  Full article.
This is how psychotherapy for depression changes the brain:
In recent years, researchers have sought to look under the hood to understand the neural correlates of the changes brought about by psychotherapy. Not only can such understanding help us hone in on the precise processes that are being acted upon in therapy, thus helping us focus on these gains, they could also show where pharmacological interventions might be complementary, and where they could directly obstruct the therapeutic work. Now a systematic review and meta-analysis in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging has outlined all we know so far about how therapy changes the depressed brain, and it suggests key changes occur in emotional processing areas. Full article.
Dangerous Confessions: Surprising New Research on Secrets:
Your partner asks you if you can keep a secret about a situation that’s developing at work. You know the relevant players and, in fact, often socialize with your partner and the very people involved in the secret. Yes, you’d like to help your partner by being a confidant, and what’s more, you feel that by sharing secrets the two of you become ever closer. But no, what will you do when you see the people implicated in the secret? How do you manage to avoid saying the wrong thing, letting on that you know about this very confidential situation? Perhaps it’s not something inherently negative, but instead involves a surprise? Your partner is planning a birthday party and doesn’t want the honoree, a friend of both of yours, to know about it. This means you have to censor everything you say for the next few weeks in hopes of not giving away any hints.  Full article.