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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.)
Laughter is the best medicine... so bring out the nitrous!
1 voice in a sea of voices
I generally don't feel positive when I have a cold.
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
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.
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
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.