As folks get ready to watch the Super Bowl on television this Sunday in the U.S., many of us will be joining or attending Super Bowl viewing parties. If you’re like most Americans, you’ll probably drive to get to that party.

But unlike most Sundays, when you drive this Sunday coming home from your Super Bowl Party, be especially careful. Why?

Because unlike other Sundays when a football game is televised, researchers found that both non-fatal and fatal car accidents increase 41 percent on average. The risk is highest within an hour of the game’s end, when most people are driving home.

What causes this rise in automobile accidents? Not surprising, alcohol was involved in most fatal injury accidents, as well as a majority of non-fatal accidents. Inattention and fatigue are two additional factors implicated.

Why does the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC) misrepresent psychological research?

For instance, in its post on its website titled, “STUDY: Manic Symptoms Linked to Specific Criminal Acts,” the unattributed and undated article suggests that a new study was released that demonstrated a causal link between manic symptoms, and well, specific criminal acts.

But when I read the study, and compared it with what was in the article on the TAC website, I saw a complete misunderstanding (or misrepresentation, whether intentional or not) of the new study.

It now makes me question the validity of any information published by the Treatment Advocacy Center on their website, because it appears their bias — to drive home the mistaken idea that mental illness = increased risk of violence — affects their ability to even deliver research news objectively.

Stress affects everyone in varying degrees. And what’s stressful to me — paying the bills, writing a great article, organizing and cleaning the house, having a mile-long to-do list — may not be stressful to you.

But regardless of what ruffles you, it helps to have many stress-relieving options on hand to either stave off stress or minimize it when you feel the tinges of overwhelm.

To get the scoop on ways to deal with stress, we spoke with Dr. Darlene Mininni, Ph.D, the author of The Emotional Toolkit and a contributor to Dr. Drew’s TV show Lifechangers. Here, she shares a list of quick and even unexpected strategies that can help.

Following these tips you’ll also find additional pieces on minimizing stress.

The importance of the comparative approach to studying the brain cannot be overstated.  The comparative approach allows us to compare human brains to brains of non-humans.

One of the key findings in this area is that the difference between human brains and brains of other species are often quantitative rather than qualitative.  Comparative studies do reveal differences, but they also reveal many similarities that can lead to a better understanding of evolution and brain development.  The primary benefits of using the comparative approach are that simpler brains found in other species make it more likely that brain-behavior relationships will be revealed, and there are fewer ethical restrictions applied to the study of other species.

Researchers who work with our closest relatives, chimps, assume that the things learned about chimps’ brains and behavior could be applied to understanding human brains and behavior.  Researchers can also make meaningful comparisons with more distantly related species: slugs, fruit flies, rats and cats.  Brain-behavior comparisons across species provide information that is difficult to obtain from studying a single species. 

“When massive, seemingly soulless corporations recognize that the happiness of the workforce is a great predictor of long-term sustainable success, then you’ll see the societal tip occur.” ~Shawn Achor

Shawn Achor spent over a decade living, researching, and lecturing at Harvard University, and has been involved in one of the largest studies of happiness and potential at Harvard and others at companies like UBS and KPMG.  He brings a truly unique perspective of applying positive psychology to the business world.

In 1998 Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association, set a new direction for the discipline:  Positive psychology. What has followed is an unprecedented publication of robust research and applied interventions.  In 2000, Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow:  The Psychology of Optimal Experience, published an article in the American Psychologist that anchored positive psychology as an evidence–based practice.

Since then the positive psychology movement has boomed.  Founded with the intention of building thriving individuals, families, and communities, proponents of the discipline can be found in popular and academic publications, working with an array of corporate entities, and teaching on college campuses throughout the world. There are even graduate degrees in positive psychology.

Does depression have an upside? Is there some sort of evolutionary advantage for a person to become depressed, for instance, to re-evaluate their lives or perhaps a choice they made that led to their current depression?

Most people who are depressed certainly wouldn’t think so. (I don’t either.)

But it doesn’t stop evolutionary psychologists and other researchers from positing that there may indeed be some sort of evolutionary reason for it.

Richard Friedman, MD, writing in the New York Times today, explores the issue.

In 1870, British explorer Sir Richard Burton allegedly coined the term “extrasensory perception” or ESP. But it wasn’t until the 1930s that the term became popular thanks to Joseph Banks (J.B.) Rhine (1895-1980).

Rhine was actually a botanist who became interested in parapsychology after listening to a lecture from Scottish author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, according to an article in APA’s Monitor on Psychology by Nick Joyce and David B. Baker, Ph.D. Doyle declared that there was scientific evidence to prove that it was possible to talk to the dead.

Rhine wanted to validate parapsychology and began working with his wife Louisa and Professor William McDougall at Duke University in 1927. According to the Rhine Research Center, before Rhine, researchers mostly explored psychic phenomenon by working with mediums to see if an afterlife really existed.

Rhine, however, wanted to know first whether the living had ESP capabilities, so he focused on testing Duke University students instead.

What did he find out?

“You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.” — Paulo Coelho

Each year is a transition.  We let go of relationships, connections to places, jobs and ways of being.  But this opens us to new people, new associations and different ways of relating.  Through death or circumstance or choice we move away from those we loved, or cared for, or knew: The unknown, the surprise, the unexpected takes their place.  This is life.

Too often the losses weigh us down with a centrifugal sadness that keeps us pinned to the passing.  Our energy is invested in the mourning, often for longer than what may be healthy or helpful.

But the loss we experience is directly proportional to the joy and love and engagement we’ve had.  We feel the pain because we knew the joy.  So the grieving must honor the connection as well.

What are some of the most depressing places to live in the United States in 2011?

There’s one easy way to gauge the mood of the country — what are people searching for on Google? Google Trends to the rescue. We can type in a query to see how many people from different geographic regions searched for the word “depression” in Google.

However, since there are many reasons a person might type in the word “depression” into Google (the economy, searching for depression glass, etc.), we compiled our own list with over a dozen more specific, commonly-searched for depression terms, including things like “depression symptoms”, “depression test” and “depression treatment” to arrive at this list for 2011.

Sadly, if you’re a resident of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, or Seattle, WA (population-adjusted leader), more people from your city type in these terms more often than in any other city in America. This suggests that Philadelphia and Seattle residents take the honor for the Most Depressing Place to Live in the U.S. in 2011. Pennsylvania and Iowa (population-adjusted leader) lead the most depressing states.

Click through to see the entire city and state list.

In a small clinical study published a few weeks ago, researchers didn’t find much difference between the three treatment groups of depressed subjects they studied — a group that received antidepressant medications, a group that received a specific type of not-commonly-practiced psychodynamic psychotherapy, and a group that received a sugar pill.

But there were some serious issues with this study from the onset, issues that call into question not only the generalizability of the results, but also their validity. It’s a shame that Reuters, who picked up on the study just yesterday, glossed over the methodology problems of the study, and instead just repeated the results as a shiny new established fact.

And easily lost in the discussion is the best result of them all — 16 weeks was all that was needed for most people in the study (who completed it) to find improvement in the symptoms of their depression, no matter what the treatment.

Let’s see what went wrong, and what the study actually tells us…

Lawmakers and policy makers love to feel like they’re doing something, even when that “something” is passing yet another bad law or writing more paternalistic policies. Well-intentioned though they may be, the government — and in fact, nobody — can stop you from making bad decisions about your life. You can’t legislate good judgment.

This past week, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) urged a complete ban on talking or texting on smartphones while driving — including hands-free devices. While the ruling isn’t law, it’s a strong recommendation from a federal agency that everyone take up the kinds of strict bans that many states already have on the books in one form or another.

The focus on the method of distraction is the same kind of “blame the technology” emphasis I’ve seen elsewhere in our society (most notably when it comes to “Internet addiction“). It’s as if our mobile phones offer a magical, supernatural ability to distract while we’re driving, while the other thousand things that can also distract us aren’t so bad.

While no one — myself included — is arguing that distracted driving is a good thing, some common sense should enter into the picture when talking about new policies and laws. There is little evidence to suggest focusing on banning a single type of distraction while driving is going to result in much change in driver behavior.

Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man… living in the sky… Who watches every thing you do, and he has a list of ten special things that he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever ’til the end of time.

But he loves you. And he needs money!
~ George Carlin, from “You Are All Diseased”

Every morning I wake up and push back the anxieties and frustrations and the never-ending things-to-do list.  I awakened to the struggle of coping with these pressures for years until I found a positive psychology intervention that was, beyond a shadow of doubt, the most powerful tool in changing my thought process:  Gratitude. 

I began the day with flooding my mind with the gratitude I had for events, people, experiences and conditions in my life.  I’ve written elsewhere about how this struggle evolved.  But I never gave where I was sending my gratitude toward any thought.  I just sent it out into the ether.  Just doing this every morning changed my attitude about life and allowed me to look forward to the day (for the most part) with less angst and more hope.  Not a bad deal.  Two minutes in the morning and the day brightened up.

There was good reason for me to begin doing my morning gratitude list.