Find Your Crowd
People cultivating a few close friendships can be just as rich in emotional nourishment as those belonging to larger social networks, right? Not necessarily, according to research showing that those with wider social circles may literally be more immune.
Working with college students, Carnegie Mellon researchers Sarah Pressman and Sheldon Cohen found that freshmen with larger social networks had a more robust immune response than those in smaller groups when given a flu vaccine. The researchers found freshmen who reported feeling lonely produced fewer antibodies than those who didn’t. Lonely freshmen with few friends had the lowest immunity of all.
The most interesting finding was the distinction between loneliness and size of the social network. Lonely students had a lowered immune response to one vaccine component while those who had few friends had a depressed immune response to another. According to the researchers, the fact that social-network size and loneliness are separate factors in immunity is supported by the observation that you can have many friends yet feel lonely. For optimal immunity, the findings seem to suggest, a few close friends simply may not be enough. The findings may also explain why freshmen visit the infirmary more often than better-connected students in sophomore, junior and senior years.
Keeping Self-Esteem And Success In Sync
In another surprising reversal of long-held beliefs, the holy grails of self-esteem and stratospheric success may each threaten immunity in certain people. Specifically, great success may be a health risk when self-esteem is low. That’s why someone like Brian, who lacks confidence, may suffer if success is especially heightened or comes on too fast. Self-esteem, for its part, can be risky when achievement doesn’t measure up to personal expectations. The phenomenon, called “self-discrepancy,” occurs when self-image differs markedly from your actual self, your wished-for self or the unfolding of life events.
To make the point, Timothy Strauman, head of psychology at Duke, asked healthy college students three basic questions: What kind of person do you think you are? What kind of person would you like to be? And, what kind of person do you think you ought to be? “If somebody says, ‘I’m lazy, but I think I should be hard-working,’ that’s a discrepancy,” Strauman explains.
Blood tests showed that students with fewer discrepancies had a greater killer T cell count. When members of this group made progress commensurate with their own self-evaluation, they had stronger immunity than those who weren’t making progress or were making progress too fast. Immunity was optimized for those rich in both self-esteem and success.
The hit to immunity, Strauman suggests, may come from continually evaluating and then modifying behavior to reach a goal — a disruption in the phenomenon known as “self-regulation.” When initial efforts to reach the goal fail, mood typically drops, but motivation may soar. When failure continues, however, motivation also falters. The higher one’s self-esteem is at the outset, the bigger the potential for both mood and motivation to fall hard.
The Curiosity Cure
The connection between good health and optimism is widely accepted, but studies show that optimism seasoned by reality works best. Researchers at Harvard studied 1,041 patients and found those identified as hopeful (optimistic but ultimately realistic) were less likely to develop diabetes, high blood pressure, colds and flu than out-and-out optimists, who were convinced they would thrive no matter what. Curious, skeptical patients, those who peppered doctors with questions or scoured the Internet for information, received an immune boost as well.
University of Kentucky psychologist Suzanne Segerstrom suggests that some optimists could be pushing so hard they end up taxing their immune system and making themselves sick. In a study that was published last year, Segerstrom gave optimists a stressful arithmetic test and found that they showed a drop in immunity. “It can be more difficult to keep working on a problem than to give up,” she notes. “When pessimists encounter difficult situations, they’re likely to disengage. Optimists are likely to keep working at them.” As a consequence of the struggle, their immune systems weaken.
Type D: A Killer Personality
Impatient, anxious and hostile, the Type A individual has for years been considered a walking time bomb, a heart attack waiting to happen and sure to keel over years before the calmer, happier Type B. But now psychologists have identified an even deadlier personality: Type D, a cynical, hostile individual who is also unexpressive, keeping those bad feelings inside.
Investigating a possible connection between Type D traits and cardiac risk, psychologists, cardiologists and immunologists followed male heart disease patients from Belgium over a period of years. Those with Type D personalities were far more likely to have heart attacks. And Type D was predictive of the worst case scenario: coronary heart failure. Type D patients were four times more likely than others to die of the disease.
Looking for an explanation, the researchers discovered that Type D heart patients all had one thing in common: an alarming overabundance of tumor necrosis factor (TNF-alpha), an inflammatory molecule produced by immune cells. Among other destructive actions, TNF-alpha can rupture arterial plaque. Ruptured plaque can obstruct the artery or vein, a condition called thrombosis, and heart attack can result.
Other research has found that Type D individuals also have killer T cells that are less active and have a diminished ability to fight infection compared with those found in more emotionally expressive peers. The finding is in line with a body of research linking social inhibition to less active immunity in the face of infectious disease.
The connection between emotion and health is still unraveling. From the subtle role of stress to the double-edged sword of optimism, emotional states influence the strength of our hearts, the pace at which we age and the way we fight disease. As with nutritional science — where a nutrient is considered protective one day and harmful the next — psychoneuroimmunology is still in its adolescence. When the code is deciphered in full, PNI will be not just a fascination, but a precision tool for a longer, healthier life.
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Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 5 Dec 2007
