figure 10.17 Under stress? Feel a cold coming on? Maybe it’s not a coincidence. Research findings indicate that people who experience high levels of stress are relatively more likely to develop colds. This is true no matter how the stress is measured. The chart illustrates the results for four different stress-measuring techniques—counting stressful life events, asking people their perceptions of life stress, measuring negative emotional experiences, or creating a stress index (bars on the left) that combines all three of the other measures.