Making Friends Helps FirstYear College Students Stay Healthy, Carnegie Mellon Study Finds.

(From AScribe)

PITTSBURGH -- First-year college students who feel lonely are protected less by the flu vaccine than other students, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon University researchers that will be published in the May issue of the journal Health Psychology.

The research team, headed by doctoral student Sarah Pressman and Sheldon Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty Professor of Psychology, found that social isolation -- measured by the size of a student's social network -- and feelings of loneliness each independently compromised the students' immune response to vaccination.

Cohen is a world-renowned health psychologist whose previous research has focused on the impact of emotions, stress and social networks on human health. His groundbreaking study on the effect of social ties on susceptibility to the common cold was published in 1997 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

This latest study could help to explain why first-year students tend to visit student health centers more than older classmates, as new students can be socially unmoored as they adjust to their new circumstances.

"The findings are similar to other research indicating that social ties are important for health, in part because they may encourage good health behaviors such as eating, sleeping and exercising well, and they may buffer the stress response to negative events," Pressman said.

The researchers recruited 37 men and 46 women, mostly 18 to 19 years old, during their first term at Carnegie Mellon. They got their first-ever flu shot at a university clinic and filled out questionnaires on health behavior. For two weeks starting two days before vaccination, they each ...