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.

Time is running out to vote for some of your favorite SXSW 2012 Interactive panel ideas through the SXSW panel picker (Friday at midnight is the deadline). Yes, you need to register a free account in order to vote, but it takes only a minute to do so.

I’ve organized a panel again for consideration, as have some other psychologists and professionals. I’ve highlighted three panels I’d like you to vote a big thumbs-up on, if you have a minute today. While people’s votes only constitute 30 percent of how a panel idea is chosen to present at SXSW Interactive, it’s an important part of the process that helps the organizers make the tough decisions.

The panel I’ve proposed is about online therapy. But not your everyday kind of online therapy…

Thank goodness the Wall Street Journal isn’t known for its outstanding health reporting.

In a story written by Rachel Emma Silverman, she reports on some preliminary research recently presented at a management conference. Like a lot of research that gives us “surprising” results, it was done on a single group of 96 undergraduate students at a single college campus.

And the task designed for the college laboratory setting by the researchers would be difficult to characterize as analogous to most people’s work environment or jobs — it was highlighting every single letter “e” or, in the second part, “a,” while reading.

The question the researchers asked — Can surfing the Internet help you to become a more productive employee?

You know it’s a good time of the year for psychology “news” when the American Psychological Association holds its annual convention. Why? Because they push out a bunch of sexy press releases about presentations at the conference.

Case in point, “Social Networking’s Good and Bad Impacts on Kids,” a presentation that presents a seemingly-random selection of research findings about social networking websites like Facebook from the past few years.

This quickly gets turned into an exclusive focus on the negative aspects of the talk — “Facebook tied to poor mental health in teens: What parents must know” (CBS News), “Too Much Technology Breeds Health Problems in Teens” (Patch.com), and of course the inevitable, “Is constant ‘Facebooking’ bad for teens?” (MSNBC.com). Talk about making a mountain out of not even a molehill (since this wasn’t new research, just a summary of what we already know).

Absent from all of the news reporting is context, as usual. So-called journalists simply take what is said at the conference or in the APA press release, consider it factual, and report on it accordingly.

Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear puts out CO2. And so, what we’re going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.
~Bill Gates

A typographical error led Amory Lovins to coin the phrase negawatts. In a brilliant 1989 keynote address to the Green Energy Conference in Montreal he outlined what has become the blueprint for a radical business and energy concept.

Pay people to do nothing.

Twenty-plus years later the idea is deeply taking hold.