Emotional Style and Susceptibility to the Common Cold

By Sheldon Cohen, William Doyle, R. Turner, C. Alper, David Skoner. Psychosomatic Medicine, 2003

627 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Objective: It has been hypothesized that people who typically report experiencing negative emotions are at greater risk for disease and those who typically report positive emotions are at less risk. We tested these hypotheses for host resistance to the common cold. Methods: Three hundred thirty‐four healthy volunteers aged 18 to 54 years were assessed for their tendency to experience positive emotions such as happy, pleased, and relaxed; and for negative emotions such as anxious, hostile, and depressed. Subsequently, they were given nasal drops containing one of two rhinoviruses and monitored in quarantine for the development of a common cold (illness in the presence of verified infection). Results: For both viruses, increased positive emotional style (PES) was associated (in a dose‐response manner) with lower risk of developing a cold. This relationship was maintained after controlling for prechallenge virus‐specific antibody, virus‐type, age, sex, education, race, body mass, and season (adjusted relative risk comparing lowest‐to‐highest tertile = 2.9). Negative emotional style (NES) was not associated with colds and the association of positive style and colds was independent of negative style. Although PES was associated with lower levels of endocrine hormones and better health practices, these differences could not account for different risks for illness. In separate analyses, NES was associated with reporting more unfounded (independent of objective markers of disease) symptoms, and PES with reporting fewer. Conclusions: The tendency to experience positive emotions was associated with greater resistance to objectively verifiable colds. PES was also associated with reporting fewer unfounded symptoms and NES with reporting more.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd5dc0acf8ff13e669b583d42af3ff425fb5796b

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In Behavioral Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Does positive affect influence health? (2005, background): “, 2000; trait: Hirdes & Forbes, 1993) and those with upper respiratory infections for trait PA (Cohen et al., 2003).”
Subjective Well-Being: A General Overview (2009, background): “In a recent study where researchers infected participants with the common cold, those who reported higher levels of well-being were more resistant to the virus (Cohen et al., 2003).”
A review of air pollution impact on subjective well-being: Survey versus visual psychophysics (2018, neutral): “The output of SWB measurements is widely implicated in social and health fields (Cohen et al., 2003; Danner et al., 2001; Fujiwara and Campbell, 2011; Ostir et al., 2001; Steptoe et al., 2005).”
Life Satisfaction is not a Balanced Estimator of the Good Life: Evidence from Reaction Time Measures and Self-Reported Emotions (2009, result): “Our study add to the literature in which measures of self-reported well-being have been found to correlate with objective physiological (e.g., Davidson 2005 and Urry et al. 2004) and medical (e.g., Cohen et al. 2003 ) criteria.”
Life Satisfaction, Household Income and Personality Traits (2012, positive): “Consistently with the literature (Cohen et al. (2003), Vitters and Nilsen (2002)), the direct effects of Neuroticism on Life Satisfaction are negative, large and significant; those of Extraversion are positive and significant.”
The epidemiology, pathophysiology, and management of psychosocial risk factors in cardiac practice: the emerging field of behavioral cardiology. (2005, background): “Other data indicate that positive emotions can c nhance immune function (53).”
Income and happiness: Evidence, explanations and economic implications (2006, background): “Individuals with higher life satisfaction scores were less likely to catch a cold when exposed to a cold virus, and recovered faster if they did (Cohen et al., 2003).”
Loneliness, social network size, and immune response to influenza vaccination in college freshmen. (2005, background): “All of these variables have been related to markers of immunocompetence in earlier studies (e.g., Cohen, Doyle, Turner, Alper, & Skoner, 2003; Cohen, Turner, et al., 2003; Marsland, Cohen, Rabin, & Manuck, 2001; Miller et al., 1999), and psychological stress has been associated with Ab response to…”
The benefits of frequent positive affect: does happiness lead to success? (2005, neutral): “, 2001), on likelihood of developing a cold (Cohen et al., 2003), or on organizational citizenship (Credé et al.”
Measuring and Understanding Subjective Well-Being (2010, methodology): “For example, Cohen et al (2003) found a strong dose-response relation between a subject’s positive emotions and the symptoms resulting from experimental exposure to common cold germs, while the corresponding relation for the absence of negative emotions was small and insignificant.”
Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience (2014, background): “Positive affect has been found to predict response to illness (Cohen et al., 2003), with higher levels correlated with lower incidence of cardiovascular disease (Boehm and Kubzansky, 2012).”
World happiness report (2012, neutral): “Cohen et al. (2003), Lyubomirsky et al. (2005), Schimmack (2003), Wiest et al. (2011).”