health Fears Are Nothing to Sneeze At
After witnessing a sneeze, people worry more about flu, heart attacks, accidents and crime, study finds
By Serena Gordon
HealthDay Reporter
(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. Read more…