Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

When you decline an invitation to do something with a friend, it’s better to blame a lack of money than a lack of time, according to researchers Grant Donnelly and Ashley Whillians at The Conversation. The pair found that participants felt less close to, and less trusting of, people who said they didn’t have time to come to a social occasion like a wedding or a dinner, compared to those who said they couldn’t afford to attend.

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

Olympic athletes have always been under intense pressure, but this year the pandemic has added to the challenges they face. At Wired, Amit Katwala explores the impact that competing at the Olympics has on athletes’ mental health.

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

Menopause involves the brain, not just the ovaries — and more research is needed to understand these neurological effects. This work could help doctors improve treatment for the symptoms of menopause, and even aid in our understanding of diseases like Alzheimer’s, explains Kim Tingley at The New York Times.

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

The Olympic Games begin in Tokyo later this month — but things are going to be very different from normal. How will the rules and restrictions surrounding the games affect athletes’ wellbeing? Jo Batey takes a look at The Conversation.

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

We all experience a phenomenon called “generational amnesia”, where we forget the ways in which previous generations shaped the world. And that makes it harder to solve global problems like climate change, writes Richard Fisher at BBC Future: if we think of the state of the world in our own youth as the “baseline”, then it’s harder to recognise long-term climate trends or declines in animal populations, for instance.

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

Have you noticed an increase in scam texts recently? I certainly have — and so has David Robson, writing at BBC Future.  These scammers often make it seem like we are facing some immediate threat like legal trouble or loss of money, capitalising on the fact that in this kind of situation we are less likely to think and act rationally. And the pandemic has provided just the right conditions for these scams to flourish, Robson writes.

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

New work is providing fascinating insights into aphantasia, a condition where you are unable to see images with your mind’s eye. There even appears to be a flip side to the condition, hyperphantasia, where mental imagery is particularly powerful. Carl Zimmer examines the new findings at The New York Times (and see also our podcast on aphantasia from 2019).

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

Sleep researchers often takes a “brain-centric” approach to their work, measuring sleep stages using EEG, for instance, or examining how sleep affects learning and memory. Yet rudimentary creatures also sleep — including the hydra, an aquatic organism which has a basic nervous system but no brain at all.  The findings suggest that our primitive ancestors slept before they even evolved brains, writes Veronique Greenwood at Wired. 

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

Electric fish seem to have mastered the art of the pause, writes Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic. Brienomyrus brachyistius communicate by producing a series of electrical pulses. But researchers have found that the fish sometimes pause during their “conversations”, apparently as a signal that what they are about to communicate is important — similar to a “dramatic pause” in human speech.

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

A neural implant has allowed a paralysed individual to type by imagining writing letters. The implant of 200 electrodes in the premotor cortex picks up on the person’s intentions to perform the movements associated with writing a given letter, translating these into a character on a screen. The individual was able to type 90 characters per minute with minimal errors, reports John Timmer at Ars Technica.