During times of heightened health worries, simple things like sneezing or clearing of the throat often act as a subtle reminder of the threat of illness.
But that’s not all they do. A single sneeze brings the flu to conscious awareness, while also raising fears such as dying as the result of a early heart attack, an accident, or being the victim of a fatal crime according to research appearing in the November 2009 issue of Psychological Science.
Subjects who had just been around a sneezing/coughing actor were three times more likely to agree to spend $1.3 billion on developing a flu vaccine instead of spending the money on creating jobs in “green” industries.
“Finding that a simple sneeze can shift feelings on an important decision – how to spend a billion dollars – should really lead people to be careful and think, ‘Is my current feeling going to lead me astray?’” says study author Spike W.S. Lee, a doctoral student in social psychology at the University of Michigan. “We often make judgments without thinking about how we’re feeling.”
Lee and a team out of the University of Michigan created two different field tests to see how a sneeze might affect a subject’s feelings and perceptions.
In the first test, 50 college students completed a single page questionnaire on their risk of certain health outcomes and their general feelings on the U.S. healthcare system. Just before being given the questionnaire, an actor passed by 26 of the study volunteers, sneezing and coughing as he did so.
Those who were exposed to the sneezing/coughing actor responded very differently when asked how likely it was that the average American would contract a serious illness (41.2% vs. 26.7% of the controls), die of a heart attack before 50 (45.4% vs. 32.1% of the controls) or dying because of a crime or accident (41.2% vs. 27.9% of the controls).
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Sneezing Worrisome In Many Ways Continued…
The sneeze-exposed group also were more likely to feel that the U.S. health care system was in need of work.
In the second test the University of Michigan researcher recruited 47 people at a Michigan area shopping mall who agreed to be part of a one-minute survey.
In this case, 23 subjects were exposed to a sneeze and cough just before taking the survey; the remaining 24 were not. When asked whether they’d prefer $1.3 billion be spent on health care or “green” job creation, only 16.7% of the controls wanted money to go flu vaccines, compared to 47.8% of the sneeze/cough exposed volunteers.
“When someone sneezes, you get a little worry response that makes all kinds of things seem more dangerous. Usually, this worry response serves us well. We want to be alerted to risk, and we’re usually less concerned with false positives than with possibly missing a real risk,” points out study co-author Norbert Schwarz, a research professor of psychology and business at the University off Michigan. “We also found that people were unaware that exposure to public symptoms of the flu had influenced their judgments of risk, their views about government spending on flu research or their opinion of the U.S. health care system.”
It’s true that fear spreads faster than any illness, and these two experiments bear this out quite clearly.
If someone (like the media) gets you all worked up and worried, this is sure to set off concerns about all the other things that might kill you. While you might not be able to control this reaction at first, being aware will help you understand what’s going on, and perhaps react more appropriately.
Daily Health Bulletin
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