The language of emotions and disease

This week's show Speaking of Faith explores the role of emotions in disease and how science is finally conceding what we have all experienced, there is a connection. This exerpt is taken from the transcript of the show. Stress, Finding the Balance Within


In The Balance Within, Esther Sternberg reflects on the differences and interconnections between "emotions" and "disease":

Emotions are always with us, but constantly shifting. They change the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves. Diseases come and go but on a different time scale. And if they change the way we see the world, they do it through emotions. Could something as vague and fleeting as an emotion actually affect something as tangible as a disease? Can depression cause arthritis? Can laughing and a positive attitude ameliorate, even help to cure, disease? We all suspect that the answers to these questions are yes, yet we can't say why and certainly not how. Indeed, entire self-cure industries have been built on this underlying assumption. But physicians and scientists until recently dismissed such ideas as nonsense, because there did not appear to be a plausible biological mechanism to explain the link.

Is there something about the biology of emotions and disease that gives them their different characteristics? Is it something in this that gives them their different characteristics? Is it something in this biology that allows one to affect the other? These questions arise at the intersection of popular belief and everyone's own personal observations that emotions have something to do with disease. The disconnect that then occurs between these questions, which grow from the essence of our human experience, and the lack of concrete explanations that satisfy rigorous standards of proof has led to a mistrust between the questioners and the scientists who are expected to answer them. Part of the reason for this is that scientists and lay people speak different languages — but so do emotions and disease. Poetry and song are the language of emotions; scientific precision, logic, and deductive reasoning are the language of disease.