Happy Saturday! Welcome to the weekend. Time to kick back, relax, and let the workweek stress just melt away. (Wouldn’t it be nice if we could melt stress away on command?)

If you had a busy week, you probably missed out a few of Psych Central’s most interesting news stories. But, do not fear: I’ve summarized three of our top brain, tech, and workplace news stories in this week’s “Week in Review” video podcast. In this episode, we answer the following questions:

• How do metaphors affect your brain?
• Can a Smartphone determine when you’re depressed?

• What causes a loss of $225.8 billion per year in the US alone?

Check out our latest video podcast below for the answers:

I recently ran across two different, new apps in development for smartphones and iPhones, both of which purport to measure a person’s mental health, happiness and even depression completely passively. (“Apps” are tiny pieces of software that run most commonly on portable devices.)

This, of course, is a Big Deal, since one of the major stumbling blocks of the thousands upon thousands of health apps are their need for something or someone to input personal health data. Without personal health data, health and mental health apps are generally pretty useless.

The method to measure one’s psychological well-being (or, as we more commonly refer to it, one’s happiness) passively is to use whatever metrics are available through the phone. Since phones generally only have a limited amount of inputs — voice, video, geo-positioning (GPS), and an accelerometer — your choices as a researcher interested in personal health data are pretty limiting.

Using only these four physical measurements, is it really possible to accurately and reliably measure a person’s well-being? Let’s find out.

If you give people the opportunity to leverage their personal social networks online to play a game, you should probably think long and hard before you shut down that game.

Of all companies you’d think might be smart enough to “get it,” Google would be at the top of my list.

But in a demonstration that apparently some companies don’t really give much thought to such things, Google decided to shut down the popular SuperPoke Pets game, after buying the company that owned it. (Which begs the question — why buy a company only to shutter its popular products?)

The real problem for users of SuperPoke! Pets (SPP) is that the game featured a virtual economy full of virtual goods. Virtual goods that people paid real money for. And of course with pets, one can become emotionally attached to them (yes, even virtual pets).

A new lawsuit just announced features a group who are suing Google over the game’s shutdown — and the loss of meaningful interaction with their virtual pets.

I live in a college town.

In fact, I live in the college town in which I used to attend college.

I moved back here a few months ago and I pass my (er, the college’s) library daily. It brings back plenty of academic memories — and, surprisingly, they’re not the stressful ones. In the six years that have passed since my graduation, the memories of stress and panic and due dates and overwhelming projects has faded.

But the positive stuff remains: the nights spent in a library study nook with my Intro to Communication textbook and a highlighter. (I loved that class.)

The satisfaction of applying a concept I learned in my 9 a.m. Intro to Logic class to my 2 p.m. Composition class. (I could point out all the major logical fallacies in our assigned reading.)

The scent of the pages of a brand-new textbook. (Am I the only one who thinks that new books sort of smell like cucumbers on the inside?)

I hit the peak of wistful sentimentality last week and found a way to re-create a portion of the academic college experience (without the stress!): watching actual college lectures on Academic Earth.

Earlier this year, I introduced World of Psychology readers to the One Hello World project in a post about how my panic attacks sometimes grow rosy in retrospect.

One Hello World is a man, a phone number, and a few musical instruments. Here’s the premise: anyone who wants to tell a story can call (316) 247-0421 and leave an anonymous voice mail message.

“Max,” the mind behind this Postsecret-esque project, will then compose a musical soundtrack to correspond with your story. He posts the completed tracks to his website at onehelloworld.com.

If you couldn’t guess by the quotes, “Max” isn’t his real name. Why the pseudonym, you might ask?

“I just don’t plaster my name all over the thing,” Max explained, “since One Hello World isn’t really about me.”

That’s because it’s about you. And me. And you, and you, and you.

From time to time, we host live chats on Facebook and elsewhere (such as our weekly Q&A chat with myself held every Tuesday night from …

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline staffs the national suicide hotline (1-800-273-TALK) and now has teamed up with Facebook, the world’s largest social network, to offer online crisis services to certain Facebook members.

I say “certain” Facebook members, because you can’t just log onto Facebook and seek out this free service. You first have to actually publicly post a comment somewhere — like on your wall — that you’re suicidal. Then you have to wait for a concerned friend or family member to read your post, click on the “Report” link, and report it to Facebook. Then, a Facebook staffer looks at the report and, if it meets its suicide criteria, will send the original Facebook user an email.

In this email from Facebook, the user will find a reminder about the national suicide hotline. But this special email also contains something you won’t find on the Facebook website, nor the website of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — a link to chat immediately online with a volunteer crisis counselor.

Facebook is providing the financial support for this new service, so not surprisingly it wants to limit its use. That’s a shame, because with the resources of a company like Facebook, they should make this sort of suicidal crisis chat service available to any of their users — without them first having to publicly come out and post about their suicidal intent.

This a great new resource and we commend both Facebook and the Lifeline for providing it as an option to their users. But the new service has a dark side as well…

With the rise of video game controllers that don’t require you to be wired to the console and be adept at thumb button-pressing — such as the Wii and the xBox Kinect — a new genre of video games have also been developed: active video games (AVGs).

Active video games — also known as “exergames” — are games that combine game mechanics with activity or exercise. Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), for instance, is a simple dance competition game that has sold over 11 million copies worldwide since its latest release just two years ago.

Many people buy exercise games, such as Wii Fit and Wii Fit Plus, to help them enjoy exercising more. Which then begs the question — do such exergames actually act as good substitutes for a more traditional physical workout?

A lot of video game players — practically all of them at one time or another — complain of the phenomenon of “losing time” while gaming. This should come as little surprise, however, as video games have become far more immersive, social, and intricate (both in plot and detailed graphics).

So what’s to account for this losing track of time while gaming or playing video games?

Psychologists to the rescue! New research (Lukavska, 2011) suggests it may be related to a theory called “time perspective.”

It must be a slow news week, as The New York Times ran another article extolling the virtues of online therapy, with a focus on videoconferencing and Skype. In a well-crafted article, Jan Hoffman gets quotes from a half dozen or so professionals to demonstrate how online therapy (or e-therapy) is on a roll.

But like most articles on this topic, the reporter does the easy legwork — talking to experts in the field — but seemingly doesn’t ask any serious questions. It’s a puff piece wrapped in beautifully baked fantasy-land pastry.

So what’s new? Let’s find out.

Ah, Pediatrics. You publish such ridiculous studies sometimes. We called you out for the flawed study on ‘Facebook depression’, a shoddy study which should have never made it past your reviewers without some serious work.

Now you’re in the news again for a study about SpongeBob SquarePants, the apparently evil cartoon that will turn 4-year-old’s minds into mush after just 9 minutes of viewing. While you also published a somewhat more balanced commentary article alongside the study, nobody seemed to notice it.

And why would they? This study was a siren call to over-generalize and suggest we have found one of the enemies attempting to influence our children. And he wears square pants.

We all know how easy it is to commit a comment of passion online. That is, it’s all too easy to post something on the Internet that you might late regret — something that might be too much information (TMI) for not only strangers, acquaintances and co-workers, but even friends and family.

And, we hear it all the time, once it’s out there, it’s out there forever. (No pressure, right?)

No group is guiltier of the passionate post than teens, especially when it comes to social media sites like Facebook.

So it was great to see a tip on the American Psychiatric Association’s blog, Healthy Minds, Healthy Lives, to help teens curtail their over-sharing. In this post, Tristan Gorrindo, M.D., a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, offers a quick tool for teens to think before they press publish.

By the way, I think this tip isn’t just relevant for teens; it’s valuable for adults, too, whether you’re blogging, tweeting or leaving a comment on another website. Regardless of age, we’re all susceptible to making quick decisions and letting our emotions do the talking. We all make mistakes.