Study finds positive thinking boosts immune response to vaccines

January 20, 2026

Positive thinking may help the brain support the immune system in a non-invasive way, according to a study published today in Nature Medicine.

Researchers in Israel set out to investigate how thoughts and emotions directly affect our physical health.

“While the clinical benefits of positive expectations from medicine (as in the case of placebo responses) have been widely documented, the neural mechanisms underlying such mind-body connections are only beginning to be elucidated,” the researchers wrote.

The research team trained 85 people to activate parts of their brains associated with rewards and positive expectations by recalling positive memories. These parts of the brain have been shown in animal studies to potentially influence immunity.

Participants were given real-time feedback using functional MRI to learn which strategies best stimulated the brain’s reward network.

After four training sessions, people were vaccinated against hepatitis B and had their blood monitored for four weeks after the injection.

Although the effectiveness of the vaccine was not measured, researchers found that people who learned how to make their brains more active with positive thinking had greater increases in protective antibodies in their blood.

The authors suggested that this approach “could be used to study new ways to enhance immune processes and could be relevant in areas such as cancer immunotherapy and chronic inflammation.”

“We may therefore be able to harness the natural abilities of the mind and brain to heal the body when needed,” the researchers concluded.

paper is available here.

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