Breaking Murphy's Law by Suzanne C. Segerstrom

Author:Suzanne C. Segerstrom [Suzanne C. Segerstrom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593852092
Publisher: Guilford Publications
Published: 2013-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

CAN OPTIMISM SUPPRESS IMMUNITY?

That brings me to the second reason I could not immediately dismiss the new cancer findings. I study the effects of optimism on the immune system, and I know optimism has unusual effects on immunity. This is not a conclusion I came to easily. When I first began to study optimism and the immune system, I started with the premise that I keep coming back to in this chapter: stress has negative effects on health, including the immune system; optimism predicts less stress; therefore, optimism should protect against negative effects on the immune system.

In my first study on this topic (my dissertation research at UCLA), I found evidence for exactly that. First-year law students who were more optimistic before they started law school had higher numbers of immune cells and more effective cells than students who were more pessimistic. This was mainly true for optimism about law school: the more students thought they would be successful in law school and achieve what they wanted, the more helper T cells they had, the better tumor-killing ability their natural killer cells had, and (to a lesser extent) the more cytotoxic T cells they had.7 Dispositional optimism was less beneficial than law school optimism, predicting only slightly higher numbers of cytotoxic T cells. This was the first published study to report a relationship between optimism, stress, and the immune system in healthy people, and it was well received in the scientific community and in the popular press.

Flush with this success, when I started as a new faculty member at the University of Kentucky, I was eager to continue in this line of research, so I collected some preliminary data on a class of first-year law students and went to work applying for research funding for a large study of optimism and immunity, using these preliminary data to demonstrate that my ideas were sound and I was capable of collecting this kind of data. Analyzing those data, however, was somewhat dismaying. Optimism and immune function were related in the UK law students, but the relationship was not as strong as in the UCLA law students. I thought about that a lot. Why? Was there some difference between UK students and UCLA students that made optimism more important at UCLA than it was at UK?

My first (and, we shall see, lucky) guess was that perhaps UCLA recruited students nationwide, whereas UK recruited more local students. Maybe when students had to move far away from home, they had to rely more on their own optimism to adjust to law school, because they had left resources like social networks back home. I went back to my UK sample and separated the students into those who had moved away to go to law school and those who were already living nearby. Sure enough, for the students who had moved away, the strong relationship between optimism and the immune system re-emerged. Hooray! I had figured it out. Optimism predicted better immune function—in this case, response to

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