Design & Emotion Blog

Via Slashdot.

This depressing news reached me today. Scientists have found real evidence to back up the theory that people who generally have a positive outlook are less likely to catch a cold or get sick. The depressing part is that I have been battling a cold for the past week, after a heavy flew of a couple of days. This would mean that my outlook hasn’t been positive enough lately… wow, that’s something to think about. And everything was going so well!

Anyway, more seriously, the article was pretty interesting and I thought it would be a good final post just before the holidays (I will be travelling to Spain tomorrow). So remember, stay positive and you’ll make it through the darker days of December!

A short summary taken from Slashdot:

A new scientific study suggests that people who frequently experience positive emotions are less likely to catch colds. Psychologist Sheldon Cohen and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University interviewed 193 healthy adults daily for two weeks and recorded the positive and negative emotions they had experienced each day. The researchers then exposed the volunteers to a cold or a flu virus.

Those with “generally positive outlooks” reported fewer cold symptoms. From the article: “‘We need to take more seriously the possibility that a positive emotional style is a major player in disease risk,’ Cohen says… 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… 28 percent who often reported positive emotions developed coughs, congestion, and other cold symptoms, as compared with… 41 percent who rarely reported positive emotions.”

Holiday greetings

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year for each and everyone of you! Thanks for all the compliments, feedback and nice emails in the past year. I hope we can keep on sharing ideas, discuss interesting issues, chat, email, skype, etc., in the next year. Let’s keep in touch or get in touch in 2007.

2006 has been great, let’s get emotional in 2007!