Just Running Over the Bleeding Obvious, Dear

The great British tradition of Applied Positive Psychology Conferences got off to a roaring start yesterday at the first Applied Positive Psychology Conference in Warwick, where researchers from Nottingham Trent University presented their revolutionary discoveries about commuter stress.

Glenn Williams and Rowena Hill, from the social sciences faculty, found that some commuters dislike such things as "insufficient room, loud music, delays, and personal odours", while others object to "smelly foods, terror alerts, unreasonable employers, lack of facilities for people with disabilities, and being molested". Effective methods for avoiding such disagreeable experiences included "singing or talking to oneself, doing laptop work, reading, making plans for after work, and 'oral gratification' - which includes chewing gum" and hence providing a free extra soundtrack of gloppity-gloppity to counterpoint the tinny mutterings of headphones, the melodious peaceability of mobile telephones and the inevitable quadrophonic sniffing chorus.

On the other hand, some methods "had little success"; strange as it may seem, there are methods less effective than singing or talking to oneself in order to overcome lack of facilities for the disabled, and even some methods which are not quite as successful as doing laptop work in order to overcome the problem of insufficient room. Such lesser methods included "venting anger at other commuters, smoking, or drinking alcohol on public transport", and hence, according to the findings of Glenn Williams and Rowena Hill from the social sciences faculty of Nottingham Trent University, probably ought to be avoided if at all possible.

They also found that "those individuals with high levels of resilience to stress were most likely to have the inner-strength to master their commuting environment", which sounds jolly useful, too.