2. 医学
  3. For centuries, doctors have recognized the placebo effect, in which the illusion of treatment, such as pills without an active i

For centuries, doctors have recognized the placebo effect, in which the illusion of treatment, such as pills without an active i

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问题     For centuries, doctors have recognized the placebo effect, in which the illusion of treatment, such as pills without an active ingredient, produces real medical benefits. More recently, respectable research has demonstrated that those who frequently experience positive emotions live longer and healthier lives. They have fewer heart attacks, for example, and fewer colds too. Why this happens, though, is only slowly becoming understood.
    Barbara Fredrickson and Bethany Kok at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill concentrated their attentions on the vagus nerve. This nerve starts in the brain and runs, via numerous branches, to several thoracic and abdominal organs including the heart.
    Among its jobs is to send signals telling that organ to slow down during moments of calm and safety. How effectively the vagus nerve is working can be tracked by monitoring someone’s heart rate as he breathes in and out.
    An index of vagal tone, is known to be connected with health. Low values are, for example, linked to inflammation and heart attacks. What particularly interested Dr. Fredrickson and Dr. Kok was recent work that showed something else about the vagal-tone index: people with high tone are better than those with low at stopping bad feelings getting overblown. They also show more positive emotions in general. This may provide the missing link between emotional well-being and physical health.
    In particular, the two researchers found, during a preliminary study they carried out in 2010, that the vagal-tone values of those who experience positive emotions over a period of time go up. This left them wondering wherner positive emotions and vagal tone drive one another in a virtuous spiral.
    They therefore conducted an experiment on 65 of the university’s staff, to try to find out. They measured all of their volunteers’ vagal tones at the beginning of the experiment and at its conclusion nine weeks later.
    In between, the volunteers were asked to go each evening to a website especially designed for the purpose, and rate their most powerful emotional experiences that day. Dr Fredrickson and Dr Kok asked their volunteers to consider nine positive emotions, such as hope, joy and love, and 11 negative ones, including anger, boredom and disgust.
    They were asked to rate, on a five-point scale, whether — and how strongly — they had felt each emotion. One point meant not at all; five meant extremely.
    In addition, half the participants, chosen at random, were invited to a series of workshops run by a licensed therapist, to learn a meditation technique intended to engender in the meditator a feeling of goodwill towards both himself and others.
    This group was encouraged to meditate daily, and to report the time they spent doing so. Dr Fredrickson and Dr Kok discovered that vagal tone increased significantly in people who meditated, and hardly at all in those who did not. A simpler procedure than meditation, namely reflecting at night on the day’s social connections, did seem to cause some improvement to their vagal tone.
    Taken as a whole, these findings suggest high vagal tone makes it easier to generate positive emotions and that this, in turn, drives vagal tone still higher. That is both literally and metaphorically a positive feedback loop.
    More generally, doctors in the ancient world had a saying: a healthy mind in a healthy body. This sort of work suggests that though this proverb is true, a better one might be, a healthy mind for a healthy body.
What is the purpose of the mentioning "placebo effect" in the pill imply in the first paragraph ?
选项 A、To remind patients that some doctors cheat with ineffective drugs.
B、To explain what works in the pill to generate placebo effect.
C、To prepare for the research on the relationship between mind and body.
D、To suggest the mechanism of placebo effect has been understood.
答案C
解析 推理题。首段第一句提到安慰剂效果其实并非是药物里的成分所产生的，第二句就提到近期有研究表明积极情绪多的人，更容易保持身体健康，因此提到placebo effect是为了引入讨论：心态与健康的科学研究。故本题答案为C。
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