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."

Or, maybe even

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe people that get sick less are happier than people that get sick more?

This is what happens when you try to treat correlation as causation, it can be interpreted many different ways.

This is new information?

[Osiris Ani]

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.

Sunlight is the common cause

[michaelmalak]

Among the effects of sunlight on people are 1) it produces Vitamin D, and 2) it produces serotonin. It's been recently rediscovered that Vitamin D prevents colds and flus. Thus sunlight puts us in a better mood and prevents flus and colds. We get more colds and flus (and depressed) in the winter because there is less sunlight.

Moods and flu prevention form a mere correlation from the common cause of sunlight.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Quoth the abstract:

For both viruses, increased PES was associated with lower risk of developing an upper respiratory illness as defined by objective criteria (adjusted odds ratio comparing lowest with highest tertile = 2.9) and with reporting fewer symptoms than expected from concurrent objective markers of illness. These associations were independent of prechallenge virus-specific antibody, virus type, age, sex, education, race, body mass, season, and NES. They were also independent of optimism, extraversion, mastery, self-esteem, purpose, and self-reported health. [emphasis added]

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.

Re:Bah

[Mr. Slippery]

Why is curing sickness so important, but the idea of curing sadness gets such scorn?

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.

Re:correlation, not cause and effect

[Mr. Slippery]

The two, of course, are related to rise in population and cutting milk consumption will not prevent crime.

Actually, Alexander Schauss [nih.gov]'s research on the diets of juvenile criminals found that delinquents drank excessive amounts of milk, crowding frutis and vegetables out of the diet; and substituting orange juice or water resulted in a decrease in antisocial behavior. (Unfortunately I don't have a link; it's work from the 1980s, mentioned in passing in one of my dead trees books: "The Healing Arts", Kaptchuk and Croucher.)

Re:Bah

[Mistlefoot]

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.