THE PRICE OF PRESSURE

摘要

Jerry seinfeld got a big laugh when he joked about a survey that found that the fear of public speaking ranks higher in most people's minds than the fear of death. "In other words," he deadpanned, "at a funeral, the average person would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy." It's a funny line, but the comedian may have had it backward. Short-term stresses like speaking in public, it turns out, boost your immune system in ways that tend to keep you out of the coffin, not put you in it. That's one of the findings that emerged from a study of 30 years of stress research published last week in Psychological Bulletin, a journal of the American Psychological Association. In a meta-analysis of more than 300 studies involving some 19,000 subjects, psychologists Gregory Miller at the University of British Columbia and Suzanne Seger-strom at the University of Kentucky combed through thousands of pages of research in search of common threads.