Right Attitudes Keep Colds at Bay

A good attitude may not fend off all of life's woes, but it can help you avoid catching a cold, a new study says.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh gave 334 healthy volunteers a series of surveys that were translated into scores of positive or negative "emotional styles" and then squirted a virus that causes colds up the volunteers' noses.

The subjects were then quarantined in hotel rooms for five days while they were tested for various signs of a cold. (In one measure, used tissues were weighed.)

The cold is a good model for testing theories about the effect of mental states on illness, said Dr. Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist and the lead researcher for the study, which was published in the current issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.

"Colds are one of the few diseases you can actually give people" without violating ethical rules, Dr. Cohen said.

People who were most likely to describe themselves with words like happy, pleased and relaxed came down with colds at one-third the rate of the people who were the least likely to use those words, the researchers found.

In addition, the people with more positive scores were more likely to have healthy habits, like exercising and getting enough sleep, and they had lower levels of hormones associated with stress.

The researchers also found a difference in the way that people who caught colds handled them.

Those with especially negative emotional attitudes were more likely than the positive people to report symptoms that were more severe than the objective measures of the infection indicated, Dr. Cohen said.