Can our emotions affect our immune system?

In and around the 1970’sGeorge Solomon, Rudolf Moos, Hugo Besedovsky and their colleagues proposed that the human immune system was connected to emotions. Their scientific colleagues laughed at them, were shut out of university laboratories, and some were denied tenure.

In 1975, Rober Ader and Nicholas Cohen devised an experiment with rats. They paired the taste of an artificial sweetener (not considered harmful) with a harmful drug that caused sickness. They fed this combination to the rats.

The rats soon tried to avoid eating this because it was making them sick.

Later, the researchers took the harmful drug out of the mix and only gave them the sweetener.

But, they noticed the rats were still getting sick, even though they weren’t taking the drug. And some of the rats even died.

This study demonstrated that the immune system could be conditioned behaviorally — meaning there was a link to the immune system and the brain that was not previously known.

The brain-immune communication, previously thought to be impossible, was very much a factor in our health. Our emotions affect our health.

This area of study is called psychoneuroimmunology and psychoneuroendocrinology.

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