LONDON, UK, February 20, 2008: An American team has found that being unable to control anger can make you four times more likely to have a slow recovery, according to a study published in the journal Brain Behavior and Immunity.
To see if anger would hold back wound healing, the team conducted a study with 98 participants who had agreed to receive standardized blister wounds, inflicted by a vacuum pump on their non-dominant forearm.
Anger control was assessed using a standard scale.
“Not all participants responded in the same way to this standardized stressor. Those who had low anger control secreted more cortisol, associated with delayed healing,” says researcher Jean-Philippe Gouin. People with low control over the expression of their anger were 4.2 times more likely to take longer to heal, compared to those with higher levels of anger control.
The authors state that these stress-induced delays in healing could increase the susceptibility to infection at the wound site and result in longer hospital stays.