Can Smiles Prevent the Common Cold?
Submitted by tomrue on
No one is saying to cut out the Vitamin C, but a report in this week's Science New Online suggests that folks with generally positive outlooks about their lives develop fewer colds than do individuals whose emotional style tends to be more depressed, hostile, or anxious. This is not the first study to demonstrate the impact of emotional styles on physical health.
Psychologist Sheldon Cohen and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh theorized that positive emotions stimulate symptom-fighting substances in the body the exact nature of which is unknown.
