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Evidence That Good Moods Prevent Colds
duguk writes in with another reason to keep happy over Christmas. A new scientific study suggests that people who frequently experience positive emotions are less likely to catch colds. Psychologist Sheldon Cohen and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University interviewed 193 healthy adults daily for two weeks and recorded the positive and negative emotions they had experienced each day. The researchers then exposed the volunteers to a cold or a flu virus. Those with "generally positive outlooks" reported fewer cold symptoms. From the article: "'We need to take more seriously the possibility that a positive emotional style is a major player in disease risk,' Cohen says... Although a positive emotional style bore no relation to whether participants became infected, it protected against the emergence of cold symptoms. For instance, among people infected by the influenza virus... 28 percent who often reported positive emotions developed coughs, congestion, and other cold symptoms, as compared with... 41 percent who rarely reported positive emotions."
This reminds me of another study to determine the relationship between height and basketball. Subjects were sorted into two groups: those who played basketball and those who did not. The basketball-playing group was, on the average, several inches taller. The conclusion? Playing basketball makes you taller!
Correlation does not imply causation.
I would say, it's partly because, for every thoughtful, intelligent psychological theorist out there, there are five guys taping electrodes to monkey testicles in order to prove that apes percieve the color blue as the smell of radishes.
Add to that the stigma that, while sickness is external, and needs treatment, sadness is internal..."in the head" as it were, and thus is a symptom of a weak/unstable mind.
I come down somewhat in the middle myself, so while acknowledging that there are many different types of mental illness that respond well to treatment, I'd never put "sadness" in that category. Being happy and unhappy, in most people, is more about your life than about anything else, and to take a pill to be happy all the time is a little too Brave New World for me.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Oh, and here's a link to the full text of the original article in case anybody's interested.
My father always said that laughter was the best medicine, which is why so many of us died of tuberculosis.
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel