Happiness and other positive emotions play an even more important role in health than previously thought, according to a study published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine by Carnegie Mellon University Psychology Professor Sheldon Cohen.
    
This recent study confirms the results of a landmark 2004 paperin which Cohen and his colleagues found that people who are happy,lively, calm or exhibit other positive emotions are less likely tobecome ill when they are exposed to a cold virus than those who report few of these emotions. In that study, Cohen found that whenthey do come down with a cold, happy people report fewer symptoms than would be expected from objective measures of their illness. In contrast, reporting more negative emotions such as depression, anxiety and anger was not associated with catching colds. That study, however, left open the possibility that the greater resistance to infectious illness among happier people may not havebeen due to happiness, but rather to other characteristics that are often associated with reporting positive emotions.

Cohen's recent study controls for those variables, with the same result: The people who report positive emotions are less likely to catch colds and also less likely to report symptoms whenthey do get sick. This held true regardless of their levels of optimism, extraversion, purpose and self-esteem, and of their age,race, gender, education, body mass or pre-study immunity to the virus.
  
The researchers interviewed volunteers over several weeks to assess their moods and emotional styles, and then infected them with either a rhinovirus or an influenza virus. The volunteers were quarantined and examined to see if they came down with a cold.This was the same method Cohen applied in his previous study, but with the addition of the influenza virus.

"We need to take more seriously the possibility that positive emotional style is a major player in disease risk," said Cohen.
 
Editor: Yan