Marital tiffs spark immune swoon ... but hypnosis offers immune aid.

Husbands and wives can really get under each other's skins. In fact, new evidence suggests that nasty marital spats temporarily weaken the immune systems of both spouses, potentially boosting their susceptibility to physical illness.

Newlyweds who employ hostile tactics while discussing problems in their relationship show far greater drops in several immune measures over the next 24 hours than recently married couples who take a more conciliatory approach to problems, assert Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser of Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus and her colleagues.

Wives experience larger immune drops than their husbands after an unkind exchange, the researchers note. Women may prove superior to men in detecting a spouse's hostile emotional messages, Kiecolt-Glaser suggests. Her team plans to see whether the immune decline in men reaches or surpasses that of their wives at later points in their marriages.

The Ohio State team studied 90 couples married for an average of 10 months. Participants ranged in age from 20 to 37. They described their marriages as happy. No one smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol excessively, suffered from serious physical illnesses, or exhibited signs of mental disorders.

Each couple stayed at a university research center for 24 hours. After identifying two or three topics that caused problems in their relationship, such as how to handle money and deal with in-laws, a couple spent 30 minutes trying to resolve these issues. The researchers videotaped these sessions and identified each spouse's positive and negative behaviors.

Participants gave blood samples for immunological analysis before the discussion and at the end of their stay.

Couples who held the most negative discussions--marked by sarcasm, interruptions, and criticism--displayed the steepest drops in two types of white blood cells. Moreover, mild stimulation of the immune system caused a weaker proliferation of white blood cells in hostile couples.

These changes may increase outside the laboratory, where hostility is expressed more freely, Kiecolt-Glaser contends.

... but hypnosis offers immune aid

Hypnosis strengthens the disease-fighting capacity of two types of immune cells, particularly among people who enter a hypnotic trance easily, report Patricia Ruzyla-Smith of Washington State University in Pullman and her co-workers.

"This is the first solid evidence that hypnosis can modify the immune system far more than relaxation alone," asserts Washington State's Arreed F. Barabasz, who helped conduct the study.

The psychologists recruited 33 college students who achieved a hypnotic trance easily and 32 students who had great difficulty doing so. Volunteers viewed a brief video describing the immune system and then were assigned to one of three groups: hypnosis, in which they listened to a hypnotic induction asking them to imagine their white blood cells attacking "germ cells" in their body and then performed this exercise through self-hypnosis twice daily for one week; relaxation, in which they floated effortlessly for an hour in a large tank of warm water containing Epsom salts and repeated the session one week later; or neither method.

Students who underwent hypnosis displayed larger jumps in two important classes of white blood cells than participants in the other groups. The greatest immune enhancement occurred among highly hypnotizable students in the hypnosis group.

Further research must establish whether hypnosis bolsters immunity in moderately hypnotizable individuals and in people suffering from diseases such as AIDS and cancer, Barabasz says.