Prior research indicates that cognitive priming manipulations that activate personal goals acutely increase or decrease natural killer cell cytotoxicity depending on whether individuals see themselves as making or failing to make progress toward their goals. Those findings in a laboratory setting revealed a psychobiological pathway whereby experiences of failure can influence health, but did not assess the impact of chronic perceived success/failure in goal pursuit on actual health outcomes. Three new studies investigated whether individual differences in perceived failure to attain personal goals influenced the self-reported symptoms of upper respiratory infections (URIs) as well as antibody response to flu immunization. Based on pilot data in young women, it also was hypothesized that the occurrence of menstrual dysfunction might interact with goal pursuit failure to more specifically predict cold and flu symptoms and optimal responses to vaccination. Perceived failure to attain goals did predict the reporting of URI symptoms as well as antibody levels postimmunization, both alone and in combination with menstrual dysfunction.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.