This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Teaching happiness benefits men newly diagnosed with HIV
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Teaching men recently diagnosed with HIV skills to help them experience positive emotions resulted in less HIV in the blood and less antidepressant use, according to recent findings. The results showed that this intervention also has the potential to help people with any serious chronic illness in the initial stages of adjustment.
“Even in the midst of this stressful experience of testing positive for HIV, coaching people to feel happy, calm and satisfied – what we call positive affect – appears to influence important health outcomes,” Judith T. Moskowitz, PhD, MPH, professor of medical social sciences and director of research at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said in the press release.
The researchers performed a randomized controlled trial based in San Francisco to determine whether a positive affect skills intervention improved positive emotion, health behaviors and psychological and physical health in 159 men recently diagnosed with HIV. They compared the results of this five-session, in-person, individually delivered positive affect skills intervention with those of an attention-matched control condition.
The positive affect skills taught during intervention, designed by Moskowitz and colleagues based on evidence showing they can increase positive emotions, included:
- recognizing a positive event each day;
- enjoying the positive event and sharing it in a journal or with another person;
- starting a daily gratitude journal;
- listing a personal strength daily and noting how you used this strength;
- setting a possible goal each day and noting your progress;
- recording a minor stressful event and listing ways to positively reassess the event;
- understating how small acts of kindness can impact positive emotion and practicing such acts daily; and
- using a 10-minute breathing exercise each day to practice mindfulness.
The results showed that intervention led to higher levels of past-day positive affect at 5, 10 and 15 months postdiagnosis compared with the control group. The investigators saw that 15 months after the interventions, 91% of participants had a suppressed viral load compared with that of 76% of those in the control group. Antidepressant use, which was roughly 17% in the control and intervention group at baseline, rose to 35% in the control group 15 months later but remained the same in the intervention group. Researchers also found that the intervention group was significantly less likely to have intrusive and avoidant thoughts related to HIV compared with the control group.
“The results clearly show that the intervention is acceptable and feasible and holds promise as an efficacious intervention for people in the initial stages of adjustment to a serious chronic illness,” Moskowitz and colleagues wrote in Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. “Future work should explore ways to tailor the intervention content to the individual to potentially increase the strength of the intervention [and] consider the possibility of integrating the positive affect skills with other established health behavior interventions to maximize effects on psychological and physical health.” – by Savannah Demko
Disclosure: Infectious Disease News was unable to confirm any relevant financial disclosures at the time of publication.
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts