Health Fears Are Nothing to Sneeze At
FRIDAY, Nov. 6 (HealthDay News) -- It may sound hard to believe, but just one sneeze is enough to increase your fear not just of contracting flu, but also of dying from a heart attack at an early age, dying from an accident or being the victim of a fatal crime, new research shows.
Of greater concern, however, was that people who'd just been exposed to a sneezing actor were three times as likely to want to spend $1.3 billion on the development of a flu vaccine instead of creating jobs in "green" industries than those who hadn't been near someone sneezing.
"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?'" said study author Spike W.S. Lee, a doctoral student in social psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We often make judgments without thinking about how we're feeling."
The study appears in the November issue of Psychological Science.
"Judgments are definitely context-dependent," said study co-author Norbert Schwarz, a professor of psychology and business at the University of Michigan. He said it was particularly telling that people from Michigan, where unemployment rates are skyrocketing, would favor funneling money into vaccine development instead of job creation.
"Most people felt that money was better spent on jobs, until someone sneezed, and that made the flu vaccine seem more important," he said. "Maybe a Congressman looking for health-care support should sneeze a lot."
Lee and his colleagues set up two different scenarios to assess how a sneeze could affect people's feelings and perceptions given the emergence of the H1N1 flu virus last spring. In the first scenario, 50 college students were selected to complete a one-page questionnaire about their risk of certain health outcomes, as well as their general feelings about the U.S. health-care system. Just before being given the questionnaire, an actor passing by 26 of the study volunteers sneezed and coughed.
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