Reacting positively to stressful situations may play a key role in maintaining good health. A new study published in the journal Health Psychology finds that those who fail to maintain positive attitudes when faced with the minor stressful events of daily living have elevated levels of inflammation. It is known that chronic inflammation plays a role in the development of many degenerative diseases.
Nancy Sin, researcher at the Center for Healthy Aging at Penn State says that “a person’s frequency of stress may be less related to inflammation than responses to stress. It is how a person reacts to stress that is important. ”
Associate Professor at the center Jennifer Graham-Engeland, says of this study, “to our knowledge, this paper is the first to link biomarkers of inflammation with mood responses to stressors in everyday life. We examined both positive and negative reactions to stress and compared the effects…”
This study examined 872 adults from the National Study of Daily Experiences project. They were instructed to record whether or not they encountered stressors, for eight consecutive days, and and to rate their positive or negative emotions. They engaged in phone interviews each day enabling researchers to evaluate a person’s emotional response on days when they experienced stressors, and compared them to days when they did not.
Blood tests were done on the study subjects measuring inflammatory markers.
“We calculated reactivity scores to see how participants generally reacted to stressors,” Nanc Sin expalins. “Then we used it to predict two markers of inflammation.” Those with more negative emotional reactions had higher inflammatory markers.
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