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Research about sneezes, sneezing, and those who sneeze
compiled by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
Sneezing has defied, or successfully interrupted, many attempts to understand why it happens and what exactly it signifies. Here are some of those attempts.
Sneezing and the Full Stomach
“Autosomal Dominant Sneezing Disorder Provoked by Fullness of Stomach,” A.S. Teebi and Q.A. al-Saleh, Journal of Medical Genetics, vol. 26, no. 8, August 1989, pp. 539-540. The authors, at the Kuwait Medical Genetics Centre in Raas, report:
[The subject is a] phenotypically normal 32 year old man, fullness of the stomach immediately after meals invariably results in three or four uncontrollable sneezes. This phenomenon is also present in his three brothers, one of his two sisters, his father, an uncle and his son, and the grandfather. The index subject became curious when his daughter started to show the phenomenon at the age of one year.... The ‘stomach sneeze reflex’ in this family has no relation to the type of food and occurs only when the stomach is full to the extent that no more can be eaten. There are usually three or four sneezes but may be as many as 15 consecutive sneezes.
The Persuasiveness of Sneezing
“Sneezing in Times of a Flu Pandemic: Public Sneezing Increases Perception of Unrelated Risks and Shifts Preferences for Federal Spending,” Spike W.S. Lee, Norbert Schwarz, Danielle Taubman, and Mengyuan Hou, Psychological Science, vol. 21, no. 3, 2010, pp. 375–377. (Thanks to Rae Tazawa for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of Michigan, report:
[We] arranged for participants in two field experiments to encounter a sneezing person before answering questions about perceived risk.... exposure to sneezing in a public space increased the perceived risk of contracting a serious disease as well as the perceived risk of unrelated threats, namely having a heart attack and dying from crime or accident (Study 1). Moreover, sneezing... shifted policy preferences from allocating resources to the creation of green jobs to allocating resources to vaccine development (Study 2).