Keep Health From Bouncing Back & Forth With Posotive Attitude

It's true! In an articel in Science News, December 16th studies prove that a positive attitude is more likely to keeps colds and sniffles at bay.
This study gives additional credence to JerSooz Motto:

Change Your Attitude Change Your Life.

We can add to it, Change Your Attitude....Better Your Health!
What have you got to lose?
Here's the articel with references at the bottom.
Warm Regards and best of health to you! Sooz
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Sniffle-Busting Personalities: Positive mood guards against getting colds (12/16/2006)
People with generally positive outlooks show greater resistance to developing colds than do
individuals who rarely revel in upbeat feelings.

Sniffle-Busting Personalities: Positive mood guards against getting colds

Bruce Bower

People with generally positive outlooks show greater resistance to developing colds than do

individuals who rarely revel in upbeat feelings, a new investigation finds.

Frequently basking in positive emotions defends against colds regardless of how often one

experiences negative emotions, say psychologist Sheldon Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University in

Pittsburgh and his colleagues. They suspect that positive emotions stimulate symptom-fighting

substances.

"We need to take more seriously the possibility that a positive emotional style is a major player

in disease risk," Cohen says.

In a study published in 2003, his group exposed 334 healthy adults to one of two rhinoviruses via

nasal drops. Those who displayed generally positive outlooks, including feelings of liveliness,

cheerfulness, and being at ease, were least likely to develop cold symptoms. Unlike the negatively

inclined participants, they reported fewer cold symptoms than were detected in medical exams.

The new study, which appears in the November/December Psychosomatic Medicine, replicates those

results and rules out the possibility that psychological traits related to a positive emotional

style, rather than the emotions themselves, guard against cold symptoms. Those traits include high

self-esteem, extroversion, optimism, and a feeling of mastery over one's life.

The latest data also show that among people with a consistently positive mood, well-being doesn't

simply reflect physical vigor. All volunteers entered the study in comparably good health.

In that project, Cohen's team interviewed 193 healthy adults by phone each evening for 2 weeks. The

participants reported their positive and negative emotions during that day. They then received

nasal drops containing a rhinovirus or an influenza virus that causes a coldlike illness.

Each person was quarantined in a separate room and monitored for 5 or 6 days. 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, 14 of 50

(28 percent) who often reported positive emotions developed coughs, congestion, and other cold

symptoms, as compared with 23 of 56 infected individuals (41 percent) who rarely reported positive

emotions.

The extent of positive emotions, but not of negative ones, exerted a strong impact on the emergence

of cold symptoms, Cohen says. His recent analysis of immune measures from volunteers in the 2003

study, published last March in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, points to enhanced regulation of an

infection-fighting substance, interleukin-6, in people with positive emotional styles.

Cohen's current study offers "an interesting twist" on the relationship between feelings and

health, remarks psychologist Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser of Ohio State University in Columbus. Other

research indicates that negative emotions influence immune function and illness development more

powerfully than positive emotions do, Kiecolt-Glaser says.

However, psychologist Barbara L. Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

notes that the new data agree with her work showing that to a surprising degree, positive emotions

can bolster the immune system to improve health.

Studies of the impact of mood on physical health need to account for both positive and negative

emotions, Cohen holds. He points to preliminary data from other teams suggesting that among

depressed people, a lack of positive emotions is a more accurate predictor of stroke than is the

extent of their negative emotions.

References: Courtesy of Science News December 16th 2006 Issue,
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20061216/fob2.asp

Cohen, S., et al. 2006. Positive emotional style predicts resistance to illness after experimental

exposure to rhinovirus or influenza A virus. Psychosomatic Medicine 68(November/December):809-815.

Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/01.psy.0000245867.92364.3c.

Doyle, W.J., D.A. Gentile, and S. Cohen. 2006. Emotional style, nasal cytokines, and illness

expression after experimental rhinovirus exposure. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 20(March):175-181.

Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2005.05.005.