An Australian psychotherapist has asked employers to watch out for workplace psychopaths, who 'are more common' than generally thought.

According to Doctor John Clarke can isolate and mentally destroy the staff around them. Dr Clarke said the only way to win the war against these psychopaths is to refuse to tolerate their damaging behaviour, a daily reports

"When people think of psychopath, they think of a serial killer or a rapist. And they are fairly similar things," he said during the Tasmanian Work Health & Safety Conference.

"The workplace psychopath is somebody who psychologically destroys the people they work with to feed their need for a sense of power and control and domination over other human beings," he said.

"They don't suffer any guilt or remorse, or in fact they enjoy the suffering of other people," he added.
According to the report, Dr Clarke said that between one and three per cent of the adult population is a psychopath.

This press release is available in German.

One of the most deeply rooted concepts in science and in our everyday life is causality; the idea that events in the present are caused by events in the past and, in turn, act as causes for what happens in the future. If an event A is a cause of an effect B, then B cannot be a cause of A. Now theoretical physicists from the University of Vienna and the Université Libre de Bruxelles have shown that in quantum mechanics it is possible to conceive situations in which a single event can be both, a cause and an effect of another one. The findings will be published this week in Nature Communications.

Although it is still not known if such situations can be actually found in nature, the sheer possibility that they could exist may have far-reaching implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity and quantum computing.

Causal relations: who influences whom

In everyday life and in classical physics, events are ordered in time: a cause can only influence an effect in its future not in its past. As a simple example, imagine a person, Alice, walking into a room and finding there a piece of paper. After reading what is written on the paper Alice erases the message and leaves her own message on the piece of paper. Another person, Bob, walks into the same room at some other time and does the same: he reads, erases and re-writes some message on the paper. If Bob enters the room after Alice, he will be able to read what she wrote; however Alice will not have a chance to know Bob's message. In this case, Alice's writing is the "cause" and what Bob reads the "effect".

How many times have you driven a route that you were familiar with, made it safely to your destination, and then realized that you can't recall any of the specifics of your journey? Maybe you were focusing on the music on the radio or the stress of the day. Perhaps in our increasingly digital existence, you were paying attention to incoming texts or listening to the turn-by-turn directions of your GPS unit.

This psychological condition, known as 'inattentional blindness', occurs when we increase our memory load with information that deflects our attention from the task at hand. When we are focused on tasks or specific information, we can sometimes be effectively blind to things that are in plain sight.

Numerous real-world examples have been documented over the years. Workers in the medical or law enforcement fields - professionals regarded as educated, intelligent and even methodical - have botched their jobs in a manner that appeared careless or negligent and often led to dangerous or even fatal outcomes on account of inattentional blindness or the related phenomenon known as 'inattentional deafness'.

According to a new study commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, when we try to keep an image we've just seen in our memory, we can blind ourselves to things we are actually looking at.

A fun example, the now famous 'invisible gorilla' experiment, involves observers who are watching a video of basketball players passing around a basketball. They are asked to focus on and count the number of times the players pass the ball to one another. While focused on this task the observers fail to see a man in a gorilla suit who walks directly across the center of the screen.

While the 'invisible gorilla' experiment is an interesting way to explain this phenomenon, not all examples are so light-hearted. In 1995, while responding to a downed officer, several police cars began to pursue four suspects who had fled in a car. According to Dick Lehr, a reporter for the Boston Globe, "Cops were flying in from all over. There were more than 20 cruisers involved at different points in the chase." The vehicle chase finally came to an end in a cul-de-sac when all four suspects fled on foot in different directions.

Trying to keep an image we've just seen in memory can leave us blind to things we are 'looking' at, according to the results of a new study supported by the Wellcome Trust.

It's been known for some time that when our brains are focused on a task, we can fail to see other things that are in plain sight. This phenomenon, known as 'inattentional blindness', is exemplified by the famous 'invisible gorilla' experiment in which people watching a video of players passing around a basketball and counting the number of passes fail to observe a man in a gorilla suit walking across the centre of the screen.

The new results reveal that our visual field does not need to be cluttered with other objects to cause this 'blindness' and that focusing on remembering something we have just seen is enough to make us unaware of things that happen around us.

Professor Nilli Lavie from UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, who led the study, explains: "An example of where this is relevant in the real world is when people are following directions on a sat nav while driving.

Why do some children succeed while others fail? A new book, How Children Succeed, says cognitive skill - the kind of intelligence that is measured in IQ scores and exam results and that includes the ability to read, write and count numbers - is an important factor, but the qualities children really need are persistence, curiosity conscientiousness, grit and optimism - collectively known as character.

American author Paul Tough says there is growing evidence parents are worrying too much about their children's academic achievements and not doing enough to help develop character-forming traits.

Too many children, he says, lead coddled sub-urban lives, shielded from adversity, and knocked sideways when they have to confront real problems in adulthood.

"In the past couple of decades we've focused way too much on cognitive skills and intelligence as the one predictor of success and I think we've ignored this other set of skills," he says.

"The scientists and teachers that I am writing about in this book are showing evidence, both in the classroom and in the data, that character skills are at least as important as IQ in terms of a child's ultimate success and are quite likely more important."

Scientists have historically relied on neuroimaging - but not electrophysiological - data when studying the human default mode network (DMN), a group of brain regions with lower activity during externally-directed tasks and higher activity if tasks require internal focus. Recently, however, researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine recorded electrical activity directly from a core DMN component known as the posteromedial cortex (PMC) during both internally- and externally-directed waking states - specifically, autobiographical memory and arithmetic calculation, respectively. The data they recorded showed an inverse relationship - namely, the degree activation during memory retrieval predicted the degree of suppression during arithmetic calculation - which they say provides important anatomical and temporal details about DMN function at the neural population level.

Drs. Josef Parvizi, Brett L. Foster, and Mohammad Dastjerdi faced a range of challenges when recording intracranially from the human posteromedial cortex. "A key challenge in specifically studying the electrical activity of this region is that unlike much of the brains outer cerebral cortex, the posteromedial cortex is not superficially visible," Foster tells Medical Xpress. Rather, he illustrates, it is part of the cerebral cortex that is hidden from view, which wraps over into the middle space between the left and right brain hemispheres "like the inner walls of a glacier crevasse."

This is a two-fold problem, he continues. "Not only does this hidden location make it very difficult to record this regions electrical activity from outside the skull on the scalp - a common technique - but also, even if one gets the opportunity to record more closely from inside the skull, one still needs to access this hidden cortex within the narrow space between the two hemispheres." Importantly, the ability to do so in the human brain only arises out of a unique clinical opportunity, where neurosurgeons have diligently placed electrodes onto the cortical walls of this inter-hemispheric space to monitor epileptic seizure activity as part of surgical planning. "The findings reported in our study are all derived from this unique opportunity, which allowed for direct recordings of electrical neural activity from the posteromedial cortex."

You were abducted by aliens, you saw Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, and then you went up in a balloon. Didn't you? Laura Spinney on our remembrance of things past.

Alan Alda had nothing against hard-boiled eggs until last spring. Then the actor, better known as Hawkeye from M*A*S*H, paid a visit to the University of California, Irvine. In his new guise as host of a science series on American TV, he was exploring the subject of memory. The researchers showed him round, and afterwards took him for a picnic in the park. By the time he came to leave, he had developed a dislike of hard-boiled eggs based on a memory of having made himself sick on them as a child - something that never happened.

Alda was the unwitting guinea pig of Elizabeth Loftus, a UCI psychologist who has been obsessed with the subject of memory and its unreliability since Richard Nixon was sworn in as president. Early on in her research, she would invite people into her lab, show them simulated traffic accidents, feed them false information and leading questions, and find that they subsequently recalled details of the scene differently - a finding that has since been replicated hundreds of times.

More recently, she has come to believe that lab studies may underestimate people's suggestibility because, among other things, real life tends to be more emotionally arousing than simulations of it. So these days she takes her investigations outside the lab. In a study soon to be published, she and colleagues describe how a little misinformation led witnesses of a terrorist attack in Moscow in 1999 to recall seeing wounded animals nearby. Later, they were informed that there had been no animals. But before the debriefing, they even embellished the false memory with make-believe details, in one case testifying to seeing a bleeding cat lying in the dust.

"We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience," says Loftus. "And we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories - we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big."

You're waiting in the reception area of your doctor's office. The magazines are uninteresting. The pictures on the wall are dull. The second hand on the wall clock moves so excruciatingly slowly that you're sure it must be broken. You feel depleted and irritated about being stuck in this seemingly endless moment. You want to be engaged by something - anything - when a thought, so familiar from childhood, comes to mind: "I'm bored!"

Although boredom is often seen as a trivial and temporary discomfort that can be alleviated by a simple change in circumstances, it can also be a chronic and pervasive stressor that can have significant consequences for health and well-being.

Boredom at work may cause serious accidents when safety depends on continuous vigilance, as in medical monitoring or long-haul truck driving. On a behavioral level, boredom has been linked with problems with impulse control, leading to overeating and binge eating, drug and alcohol abuse, and problem gambling. Boredom has even been associated with mortality, lending grim weight to the popular phrase "bored to death."

New study shows fear is hard to extinguish from the developing teenage brain, which may explain why anxiety and depression spikes during adolescence.

A new study by Weill Cornell Medical College researchers shows that adolescents' reactions to threat remain high even when the danger is no longer present. According to researchers, once a teenager's brain is triggered by a threat, the ability to suppress an emotional response to the threat is diminished which may explain the peak in anxiety and stress-related disorders during this developmental period.

The study, published Sept. 17 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is the first to decode fear acquisition and fear "extinction learning," down to the synaptic level in the brains of mice, which mirror human neuronal networks. Also, through human and rodent experiments, the study finds that acquired fear can be difficult to extinguish in some adolescents. By contrast, the study shows that adults and children do not have the same trouble learning when a threat is no longer present.

"This is the first study to show, in an experiment, that adolescent humans have diminished fear extinction learning," says the study's lead author, Dr. Siobhan S. Pattwell, a postdoctoral fellow at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell. "Our findings are important because they might explain why epidemiologists have found that anxiety disorders seem to spike during adolescence or just before adolescence. It is estimated that over 75 percent of adults with fear-related disorders can trace the roots of their anxiety to earlier ages."

Childhood obesity is a growing health concern in the public sphere, but for many of us, it also hits close to home. But while public health campaigns have singled in on parents providing children with unhealthy nutrition options and with poor examples of healthy eating, new research indicates that some of the problem may lie with fast food companies and their overly effective marketing campaigns.

A study has found that fast-food logos are branded into the minds of children from an early age.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood obesity has more than tripled over the past 30 years. And perhaps more damning, the government bureau reports that "[the] percentage of children aged 6-11 years in the United States who were obese increased from 7% in 1980 to nearly 20% in 2008. Similarly, the percentage of adolescents aged 12-19 years who were obese increased from 5% to 18% over the same period."

The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Kansas Medical Center, showed children 60 logos from popular food brands, like Rice Krispies and KFC and 60 logos from popular non-food brands, like BMW and FedEx. The children were aged between 10 and 14. Then, using a functional MRI scanner, which measures blood flow to different areas in the brain, they watched the brains of these children react to the different logos.