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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."
Maybe happy people just don't complain as much.
It's an interesting correlation, but the article/study doesn't give a convincing argument "positive" feelings can prevent illness. It simply reports positive feelings and emotions are closely correlated to resistance to acquiring or displaying symptoms from influenza (rhinovirus).
I don't discount a positive attitude is a good thing to have, but a more rigorous approach could have given better or more convincing results. For example, is it possible some people have a less positive outlook or less positive emotions because they have a less effective immune system and therefor are more often ill (thus introducing a possible reason for the less positive emotions)?
Relatedly, is it possible those with positive outlooks and emotions are just that because they have a strong immune system and are rarely ill?
I'd be interested in seeing a study where some of the "negative" subjects were trained in positive emotions and reintroduced to the study to see if their results are different. I'd like to guess positive feelings positively influences their health, but this study doesn't give that proof.
(My favorite example of this kind of "study" is the correlation between increased sales of ice cream and drownings, leading some to possibly think ice cream increases drowning risk... of course ignoring the fact that ice cream sales increase in warmer weather when more people are swimming.)
Every morning since I started drinking regularly ... but at the same time, I haven't had a cold since then either.
I am, therefore you think.
Laughter is the best medicine... so bring out the nitrous!
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I generally don't feel positive when I have a cold.
...but I would like to take the opportunity to point out that this Sheldon Cohen is not the same as the former IRS tax commissioner who wrote the tax code in '78 and is the author of the famous and controversial book on the insight into the IRS's inner chamber members that so many of us are familiar with.
I was introduced to the former Mr. Cohen at Stanford in '98. After reading a few of his papers on the immune system, I would not doubt the legitimacy of his trials. Here's a bit more on his works!
I eat bananas on a regular basis and have noticed that this keeps rogue alligators away from me. The victims of rogue alligator attacks never have bananas on their person. I strongly advise those who are worried about rogue attack from alligators to eat bananas.
I'm not going to dig into the co-relation/causality side of things, I know it will be done to death because it's the obvious dig.
But having read down the forum posts a bit, I wonder:
Why is curing sickness so important, but the idea of curing sadness gets such scorn?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Wonder what would happen if they did a study like this about STD's? "I felt great and I caught it anyway!!! AAUUUGH!"
C|N>K
People who report fewer negative feelings also report fewer cold symptoms.
Of course if you had read the article you would have seen the part where the subjects were kept under constant observation for 5 days. They're not just going by the subjective reports.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
People who tend to express more negative emotions are typically more emotionally stressed. Chronic excessive emotional stress has been quite well known to be physically debilitating, as it generally weakens the immune system. Beyond that, the link between depression and immunodeficiency is hardly a new one; its causation actually swings in both directions.
Moods and flu prevention form a mere correlation from the common cause of sunlight.
These results occurred regardless of objective indicators of immune response. The results showed that between two people with equally healthy immune systems, the one with the PES would experience or manifest fewer symptoms than the one with the NES, although both were equally likely to be infected by the virus.
I agree that it does not necessarily prove causation; however, it does prove that the researchers accounted for your counter-example.
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
I agree, I don't see how so many here try to make it something 100% subjective when it clearly isn't. As I've said above (a bit shorter, because I thought it was obvious until I had read so many comments claiming otherwise) -- this is a scientific research using scientific methods, and the findings are further strengthened by the heightened interleukin-6 rates found earlier.
:-p
The phone stuff here was merely made during the pre-study phase to find out their emotional patterns for the scientists to know who the heck were optimist/pessimists in the first place! I can see it being questions like "how was your day", "what were your happiest moment in the past week/month/year", "how often do you have truly genuine fun", and so on. Then those 193 people were quarantined in their respective, isolated, rooms and studied for 5-6 days. Scientists then kept check on their cold symptoms they all shared through artificial infection with an influenza virus.
Anyway, I can also not see the illogical about this from a purely scientific perspective. I can definitely see nature having evolved a way to "reward" some optimist organisms, humans or otherwise, because of the correlation with living a successful life. This isn't exactly the first time I hear studies, yes, actual studies, not some phone calls, coming to a conclusion like this. It seems most simply have a problem connecting psychology with physiology, but then I hope it's not coming as a surprise that from a scientific standpoint, psychology is highly physiologic and clearly connected via chemical signals and substances in the brain. Why can't the brain and body act positively to certain psychological reactions? It only makes sense to me. Laughter alone is already documented to release endorphines, and laughter has its foundation in psychology. Psychology isn't exactly some totally different magic wand waving voodoo that only a nutcase would find related to our bodies...
But this is perhaps all due to something unscientific I've noticed in geek communities, in that many have a cynical and pessimist outlook on life, whether it is laws, science, psychology, or other things. One can basically know what the replies will be to a story like this regardless what it'll tell without looking at the actual replies. Sometimes I wonder if it's because "we" are so smart to spot the bad things, or if it's just us being overly negative in nature about certain things that it does more harm than good, possibly giving rise to the common and real "social handicaps" people this group is so often generalized to.
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Sickness is by defintion a dysfunction. Sadness is often an appropriate reponse to circumstances - like pain, it tells us that something is wrong. The ability to experience pain is essential to our physical health; the ability to experience sadness is essential to our mental health.
Of course, sometimes pain or sadness can be overwhelming, or there's nothing to be done about their causes at the moment. If I break my leg, morphine for the pain, please. And if I've just been dumped by a girlfriend, a good stiff drink or three for the sadness, please. But if I try to block the pain and walk on the leg, or block the sadness and don't learn from whatever didn't work with the girl, that's not going to be healthy.
I wonder if the lesson of this study, that happy-thinking people are less likely to get sick, is that if you're in a situation where happy-thinking is easy, you're experiencing less stress, therefore have better immune functioning; whereas if you're tired, hungry, and broke - and therefore less likely to find yourself thinking happy thoughts - you're more likely to get sick.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
Did anyone consider that people with weak immune systems (or at a weak immunity stage) might be more prone to being in a bad mood.......
The cause and effect would then reverse - colds cause bad moods which I would consider quite obvious. I have felts many colds coming on long before they happened - and I am sure that I have read that the most contageous stage of a cold is almost before you 'know' you have it.
Now I am not saying that these 'bad mood' people actually had colds, simply that when your immune system is working hard in one area and leaving you weak in another, it is certainly possible that your moods may be affected.
They only asked 100 people. In the two groups, they had 50 people. The numbers are 14 and 23. If you assume Poisson statistics, the error bars are about 4-5. These numbers are statistically consistent with no difference whatsoever. And as someone else said, the actual study showed no difference between infection rates, only in reported symptoms.
Well, for some of us, it's most likely a chemical imbalance. In my case, geneology and medical history have shown that no amount of well-wishing or good life circumstances is going to cure my depression. It comes and it goes, and I can (and have) lived better through chemistry, but I am currently off the meds. The side effects are too much for me, and even if they weren't, I don't like the idea of being dependant on anything, much less drugs. That, and my depression isn't currently that bad.
I realize I'm not "most people", but it's not out of the realm of possibility that chemicals in the brain affect your mood, and you can thereby bring a person whose mood is *always* crippling depression up to a level of at least liveable malaise using chemicals. It's not being happy all the time, it's just trying to be a productive member of society and not suffering for it.
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A bigger problem is that we are basing all of this conversation on an article about a study, rather than the paper itself. If you have ever been involved with anything involving the press, you would probably be a lot less doubtful of the researchers methods assuming that the reporter simply flubbed some details and completely made up some lines. I'm not saying ALL reporters are bad, but I have personally been witness to a number of events (Less than ten, more than five?) that I later read reports of in newspapers, saw television news spots, etc. Every single one of them had glaring errors. Often a small number of news sources would be pretty much spot on, but then others would have details that are simply apocryphal, or miss the whole point completely.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman