LOS ANGELES - The next time you glare at someone for sneezing near you in an elevator, be sure to look long and hard at the offending germ spreader: It may protect you from getting what he or she has.
A new study published this month in Psychological Science suggests that the very sight of sickness prompts the immune system to mount defenses against illness. That finding follows naturally from earlier research suggesting that disgust - the typical first reaction we have to a person with, say, open sores - may be part of a "behavioral immune system." Revulsion, after all, makes us more likely to move away from the source of infection - and thereby less likely to catch it.
But this is the first experiment that demonstrates a direct link between viewing signs of illness and heightened immune response in response. In it, University of British Columbia psychology researchers took 28 people and tested their blood for a common immune marker. Among subjects who had watched a slide show of people with disease symptoms, levels of the immune marker rose almost 25 percent higher than their pre-slide-show levels.
