用心理疗法能治糖尿病和癌症

One day in the fall of 1981, eight men in their 70s stepped out of a van in front of a converted monastery in New Hampshire. They shuffled forward, a few of them arthritically stooped, a couple with canes. Then they passed through the door and entered a time warp. Perry Como crooned on a vintage radio. Ed Sullivan welcomed guests on a black-and-white TV. Everything inside — including the books on the shelves and the magazines lying around — were designed to conjure 1959. This was to be the men’s home for five days as they participated in a radical experiment, cooked up by a young psychologist named Ellen Langer.
1981年秋季的一天，新罕布什尔州一座经改建的修道院前，八名70多岁的老年男子走下了面包车。他们步履蹒跚，其中一些人像关节炎患者一样弯腰驼背，还有两位拄着拐杖。他们进门后，就像进入了一条时间隧道。老式收音机里传来佩里·科莫（Perry Como，人称“C先生”，美国歌手、电视明星）的低声吟唱。黑白电视机上，埃德·沙利文（Ed Sullivan，美国娱乐作家和电视节目主持人）正向嘉宾们表示欢迎。这里的一切——包括书架上的书和四下里散落的杂志——都是为营造出1959年的氛围而设计和布置的。在五天的时间里，这里将成为这些老人暂时的家园。他们所参与的，是年轻的心理学家埃伦·兰格(Ellen Langer)精心策划的一项“激进实验”。

The subjects were in good health, but aging had left its mark. “This was before 75 was the new 55,” says Langer, who is 67 and the longest-serving professor of psychology at Harvard. Before arriving, the men were assessed on such measures as dexterity, grip strength, flexibility, hearing and vision, memory and cognition — probably the closest things the gerontologists of the time could come to the testable biomarkers of age. Langer predicted the numbers would be quite different after five days, when the subjects emerged from what was to be a fairly intense psychological intervention.
虽然受试者们的健康状况都相当不错，但衰老已经在他们身上留下了痕迹。“那时还没有‘75岁是新的55岁’这样的概念，”兰格说，如今67岁的她是哈佛大学任职时间最长的心理学教授。这些老人在抵达实验地点之前接受了一系列检查，如灵巧性、握力、柔韧性、听觉和视觉、记忆力和认知功能——当年，这些很可能是老年学家掌握的最接近年龄测试生物标志物的指标。兰格预测，五天之后，当受试者们结束大强度心理干预的时候，这些指标都将大为改观。

Langer had already undertaken a couple of studies involving elderly patients. In one, she found that nursing-home residents who had exhibited early stages of memory loss were able to do better on memory tests when they were given incentives to remember — showing that in many cases, indifference was being mistaken for brain deterioration. In another, now considered a classic of social psychology, Langer gave houseplants to two groups of nursing-home residents. She told one group that they were responsible for keeping the plant alive and that they could also make choices about their schedules during the day. She told the other group that the staff would care for the plants, and they were not given any choice in their schedules. Eighteen months later, twice as many subjects in the plant-caring, decision-making group were still alive than in the control group.
在此之前，兰格已经进行了两项涉及老年患者的研究。其中一项发现，在奖励的激励下，处于记忆力减退早期阶段的养老院老人能够在记忆力测试中获得更好的成绩。这说明，在许多情况下，对外界漠然被错误地当作大脑退化。在另一项如今被公认为社会心理学经典的研究中，兰格将室内植物分发给两组养老院老人。她告诉其中一组老人他们要负责养活这些植物，并允许他们对自己的作息安排做出选择。而另一组老人则被告知，植物有工作人员照顾，且他们没有得到作息安排上的任何选择。18个月后，关怀植物、并能对自己的作息时间表做出决策的那一组仍然健在的老人是对照组的两倍。

To Langer, this was evidence that the biomedical model of the day — that the mind and the body are on separate tracks — was wrongheaded. The belief was that “the only way to get sick is through the introduction of a pathogen, and the only way to get well is to get rid of it,” she said, when we met at her office in Cambridge in December. She came to think that what people needed to heal themselves was a psychological “prime” — something that triggered the body to take curative measures all by itself. Gathering the older men together in New Hampshire, for what she would later refer to as a counterclockwise study, would be a way to test this premise.
在兰格看来，这些证据显示了当时的生物医学模式——即心灵和身体分道而驰——陷入了认识误区。12月，当我在她位于马萨诸塞州剑桥的办公室里见到她时，她说，当时医学界相信“病原体侵入是导致人体患病的唯一途径，而要恢复健康，也惟有摆脱病原体”。她逐渐产生的一个设想是，人需要某种心理上的“触发刺激”来自行痊愈，也就是触发身体自行动用所有的康复手段。让上文提到的老年男性汇聚新罕布什尔州，进行她后来所称的“逆时针”研究，就是测试这个假设的一种方式。

The men in the experimental group were told not merely to reminisce about this earlier era, but to inhabit it — to “make a psychological attempt to be the person they were 22 years ago,” she told me. “We have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this,” Langer told the men, “you will feel as you did in 1959.” From the time they walked through the doors, they were treated as if they were younger. The men were told that they would have to take their belongings upstairs themselves, even if they had to do it one shirt at a time.
她要求实验组的老人不要止步于对旧时光的缅怀，而是要让自己穿越回去，栖息于其中——“从心理层面尝试做回22年前的自己，”兰格向我描述道。她还对他们说：“我们有很好的理由相信，如果你们能成功地做到这一点，你们会觉得自己还是1959年的那个人。”从他们进门的那一刻起，他们就被当做年轻人对待。他们被告知，他们必须自己把行李搬上楼去，哪怕他们一次只拿得动一件衬衫。

Each day, as they discussed sports (Johnny Unitas and Wilt Chamberlain) or “current” events (the first U.S. satellite launch) or dissected the movie they just watched (“Anatomy of a Murder,” with Jimmy Stewart), they spoke about these late-'50s artifacts and events in the present tense — one of Langer’s chief priming strategies. Nothing — no mirrors, no modern-day clothing, no photos except portraits of their much younger selves — spoiled the illusion that they had shaken off 22 years.
每天，他们讨论着体育（约翰尼·尤尼塔斯[Johnny Unitas，曾获国家橄榄球联盟最有价值球员]或威尔特·张伯伦[Wilt Chamberlain，前美国NBA联盟职业篮球运动员]）和“时事”（美国发射第一枚卫星），或是评析刚刚看过的电影（詹姆斯·斯图尔特[Jimmy Stewart]主演的《桃色血案》[“Anatomy of a Murder”]）——他们使用现在时态谈论这些50年代末的物品和事件，这也是兰格主要的“触发刺激”策略之一。不会有任何东西，包括镜子和现代服装，来扰乱这种“时光倒流22年”的幻觉，即使有照片，那也是他们自己年轻时的肖像。

At the end of their stay, the men were tested again. On several measures, they outperformed a control group that came earlier to the monastery but didn’t imagine themselves back into the skin of their younger selves, though they were encouraged to reminisce. They were suppler, showed greater manual dexterity and sat taller — just as Langer had guessed. Perhaps most improbable, their sight improved. Independent judges said they looked younger. The experimental subjects, Langer told me, had “put their mind in an earlier time,” and their bodies went along for the ride.
在这段小住结束时，这些老人再度接受了检查。实验组在多项指标上远远优于对照组。后者之前就来到了这所修道院，但研究人员只鼓励他们回忆过去，而没有要求他们想象自己重返年轻时代。实验组老人的身体柔韧性更强，手部更加灵巧，坐姿时腰背也挺得更直——正如兰格所猜测的那样。也许最不可思议的是，他们的视力也有所改善。独立的评委表示他们看上去更年轻了。兰格告诉我，实验组受试者“让自己的心境回到了年轻时代”，他们的身体也随之调整。

The results were almost too good. They beggared belief. “It sounded like Lourdes,” Langer said. Though she and her students would write up the experiment for a chapter in a book for Oxford University Press called “Higher Stages of Human Development,” they left out a lot of the tantalizing color — like the spontaneous touch-football game that erupted between heretofore creaky seniors as they waited for the bus back to Cambridge. And Langer never sent it out to the journals. She suspected it would be rejected.
实验结果太棒了，简直让人难以置信。“听起来就像卢尔德（法国南部小镇，著名朝圣地，相传人们可以在那里治愈一切疾病——译注）一样，”兰格说。虽然她和她的学生们在牛津大学出版社(Oxford University Press)出版的《人类发展的较高阶段》(Higher Stages of Human Development)中用一个章节的篇幅介绍这项实验，但他们省略了很多动人的情节，例如，在等巴士返回剑桥时，这些之前很僵硬，仿佛一动就会咯吱作响的老骨头自发组织了一场触身式橄榄球赛。出于对退稿的担心，兰格没敢将这些内容写在投稿给刊物的文章中。

After all, it was a small-sample study, conducted over a mere five days, with plenty of potentially confounding variables in the design. (Perhaps the stimulating novelty of the whole setup or wanting to try extra hard to please the testers explained some of the great improvement.) But more fundamental, the unconventionality of the study made Langer self-conscious about showing it around. “It was just too different from anything that was being done in the field as I understood it,” she said. “You have to appreciate, people weren’t talking about mind-body medicine,” she said.
毕竟，这只是为期五天的一个小样本研究，设计中存在大量潜在混淆的变量。（或许是整个实验令人振奋的新颖性，或者是受试者为了取悦测试者而格外努力，这些都可能在一定程度上解释某些指标的显著改观。）但更为根本的是，这项研究的标新立异使兰格不太好意思到处展示。“在我看来，这跟该领域当时在进行的研究工作相去太远，”她说。“要知道，那时没有人谈论身心医学(mind-body medicine)。”

Langer did not try to replicate the study — mostly because it was so complicated and expensive; every time she thought about trying it again, she talked herself out of it. Then in 2010, the BBC broadcast a recreation, which Langer consulted on, called “The Young Ones,” with six aging former celebrities as guinea pigs.
兰格没有尝试重复这项实验，主要是因为它太复杂，成本也太高，每次她产生再试一次的念头，她都劝阻了自己。直到2010年，英国广播公司(BBC)聘请兰格担任顾问，重复了这项实验，并将其做成一档节目，名为“年轻一代”(The Young Ones)，把六位年迈的前名星当作实验对象。

The stars were squired via period cars to a country house meticulously retrofitted to 1975, right down to the kitschy wall art. They emerged after a week as apparently rejuvenated as Langer’s septuagenarians in New Hampshire, showing marked improvement on the test measures. One, who had rolled up in a wheelchair, walked out with a cane. Another, who couldn’t even put his socks on unassisted at the start, hosted the final evening’s dinner party, gliding around with purpose and vim. The others walked taller and indeed seemed to look younger. They had been pulled out of mothballs and made to feel important again, and perhaps, Langer later mused, that rekindling of their egos was central to the reclamation of their bodies.
这些明星们被老式轿车送到了一幢精心改建成1975年风格（甚至包括那个时期俗气的墙面艺术）的乡间别墅。一周后，他们重新露面，一个个都显得青春焕发，就像当年兰格实验中那些年逾七旬的老人一样。他们的检测指标也出现明显改善。有个人进去时还坐着轮椅，出来时却可以自己拄着拐杖行走了。还有一位，一开始就连穿袜子也要别人帮忙，到实验结束前夕却操办了告别晚宴，意志坚定精神抖擞地忙进忙出。其他人步行时腰杆也挺得更直，确实看起来年轻多了。他们不再被束之高阁，而是再次觉得自己重要，有价值。后来兰格想到，唤醒自我意识也许在他们身体重现活力的神奇变化中起到了核心作用。

The program, which was shown in four parts and nominated for a Bafta Award (a British Emmy), brought new attention to Langer’s work. Jeffrey Rediger, a psychiatrist and the medical and clinical director of Harvard’s McLean Hospital, was invited by a friend of Langer’s to watch it with some colleagues last year. Rediger was aware of Langer’s original New Hampshire study, but the made-for-TV version brought its tantalizing implications to life.
这档分四集播出的节目获得了英国电影学院奖（Bafta Award，相当于英国的艾美奖[Emmy]）提名，并引发人们对兰格的研究产生新的关注。去年，兰格的一个朋友邀请哈佛大学医学院教学附属麦克莱恩医院(Harvard’s McLean Hospital)的精神病学家、医务和临床主任杰弗里·雷迪格(Jeffrey Rediger)与同事们一起观看了这档节目。雷迪格早就对兰格当年在新罕布什尔州进行的研究略知一二，但这个为电视制作的版本生动展现了该项研究的诱人影响。

“She’s one of the people at Harvard who really gets it,” Rediger told me. “That health and illness are much more rooted in our minds and in our hearts and how we experience ourselves in the world than our models even begin to understand.”
“兰格是哈佛大学里真正懂行的几个人之一，”雷迪格告诉我。“也就是说，健康和疾病在更大程度上植根于我们的思想和心情，以及我们在世上如何体验自己，而这是现有医学模式根本不理解的。”

Langer’s house in Cambridge was as chilly as a meat locker when we arrived together, having walked from campus, last winter. The back door had been left open all day so that her aging, coddled Westie, Gus, could relieve himself in the yard. (Langer’s partner, Nancy Hemenway, who normally would be at home, was away.) Gus has a brain tumor. “He was supposed to be dead over a year ago,” Langer said. “But I think he might outlive us all.”
去年冬天，我和兰格从校园里一起步行到她家去，房子里冷得好像冷藏室一样。后门整天敞开着，好让她宠爱的那条老西高地白梗犬格斯(Gus)可以自由地跑到院子里去玩。（兰格的伴侣，南希·海明威[Nancy Hemenway]通常在家，但那天正好出去了。）格斯患有脑肿瘤。“照说它在一年前就会死，”兰格说。“但我觉得它说不定比我们所有人都活得久。”

In the kitchen, Langer began laying out wide noodles for a lasagna she was making for an end-of-term party. It was the last time she would meet with her students for a while; they were about to scatter for the winter break, and she was leaving for a sabbatical in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where she and Nancy have another home. (Langer planned to Skype into weekly lab meetings.)
兰格在厨房里忙活着，拿出宽面条准备做意大利千层面，好在期末聚会上招待大家。这是今后一段时间内她最后一次跟自己的学生碰面了——寒假开始后，大家将各奔东西，而她准备动身前往墨西哥的巴亚尔塔港休长假，她和南希在那里还有一个居所。（兰格计划通过Skype参与每周一次的实验室会议。）

“Family recipe?” I asked of the dinner.
“这是家传的菜谱吗？”我问起了晚餐。

“I don’t follow recipes — you should know that,” she said. She piled on an immoderate amount of cheese. “Besides, if I blow it, what’s going to be the cost?” Langer said. “Is it anyone’s last meal?” She added, “My students aren’t going to love me if my lasagna’s no good?”
“我从不拘泥于菜谱的——这你知道，”她一边说，一边往面上大量地堆奶酪。“再说，就算我搞砸了又怎么样？这又不是谁最后的晚餐；就算我做的千层面不好吃，难道我的学生们就会因此不爱戴我？”

Langer was born in the Bronx and went to N.Y.U., becoming a chemistry major with her eye on med school. That all changed after she took Psych 101. Her professor was Philip Zimbardo, who would later go to Stanford and investigate the effects of authority and obedience in his well-known prison experiment. Human behavior, as Zimbardo presented it, was more interesting than what she’d been studying, and Langer soon switched tracks.
兰格出生于布朗克斯，在纽约大学攻读化学专业，想着以后进医学院。然而，在她听了《心理学101》(Psych 101)课之后，一切都改变了。她师从的菲利普·津巴多(Philip Zimbardo)教授后来去斯坦福大学任教，并在著名的监狱实验中研究了权威和服从的影响。兰格从津巴多教授的讲课中发现，人类行为比她之前学的东西更有意思，于是她很快换了专业。

She went on to graduate work at Yale, where a poker game led to her doctoral dissertation on the magical thinking of otherwise logical people. Even smart people fall prey to an “illusion of control” over chance events, Langer concluded. We aren’t really very rational creatures. Our cognitive biases routinely steer us wrong. Langer’s notion that people are trained not to think and are thus extremely vulnerable to right-sounding but actually wrong notions prefigured many of the tenets of “behavioral economics” and the work of people like Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economic sciences. But unlike many researchers who systematically work out one concept until they own it, Langer’s peripatetic mind quickly moved on to other areas of inquiry. “I was never — and maybe this is a character flaw — the type of person who is going to take one idea and beat it to death,” she said. “Part of that is that I have so many ideas. If whatever it is I’m excited about now doesn’t happen, it doesn’t matter, because there’s always the next possibility.”
她的研究生阶段在耶鲁大学(Yale)度过，在那里，一场扑克游戏给了她启迪，使她写出一篇有关通常讲究逻辑的人们迸发突发奇想的博士论文。兰格的结论是：即使聪明人也容易陷入对于偶然事件的“控制错觉”。我们真的算不上一种高度理性的生物。认知偏见经常将我们导向错误的方向。兰格认为，人们养成了不假思索的习惯，这使他们很容易被似是而非的理念误导。这一观念的形成早于许多流派的“行为经济学”，也早于诺贝尔经济学奖得主丹尼尔·卡尼曼(Daniel Kahneman)等人的研究。但与许多锲而不舍地钻研某个概念、直到它为自己所有的研究者不同，兰格的思维经常信马由缰地转向其他研究领域。“我从来不是能追着一个问题打破砂锅问到底的人，或许这是一种性格缺陷，”她说。“部分原因是我总是有太多的想法。如果现在让我激动不已的东西没能搞出名堂，那没关系，因为始终存在下一个可能性。”

By the 1970s, Langer had become convinced that not only are most people led astray by their biases, but they are also spectacularly inattentive to what’s going on around them. “They’re just not there,” as she puts it. When you’re not there, Langer reasoned, you’re very likely to end up where you’re led. She set up a number of studies to show how people’s thinking and behavior can easily be manipulated with subtle primes.
到了20世纪70年代，兰格逐渐确信，多数人不仅被自己的偏见带上歧途，还对身边发生的事情极其漫不经心。就像她所说的，“他们就是心不在焉。”兰格的推理是，当你心不在焉的时候，你很容易被牵着走。她设立了多项研究，旨在揭示人们思路和行为很容易被细微的“触发刺激”所操纵。

In one, she and her colleagues found that office workers were far more likely to comply with a ridiculous interdepartmental memo if it looked like other official memos. In another, created with her Yale mentor, Robert Abelson, they asked behavioral and traditional therapists to watch a video of a person being interviewed, who was labeled either “patient” or “job applicant,” and then evaluate the person. The behavioral therapists regarded the interviewee as well adjusted regardless of whether they were told the person was a patient or an applicant. But the traditional therapists found the interviewee labeled “patient” significantly more disturbed. Even trained observers “were mindlessly led by the label,” Langer says.
在一项研究中，她和同事们发现，只要看起来跟其他官方的内部通知差不多，哪怕是一份内容荒谬的跨部门通知，也会让上班族们照办。在另一项与她在耶鲁大学的导师罗伯特·艾贝尔森(Robert Abelson)合作创建的研究中，他们要求行为治疗师和传统治疗师观看某个身份被标注为“患者”或“求职者”的人接受采访的视频，然后对此人做出评估。无论是对所谓的“患者”还是“求职者”，行为治疗师认为这位受访者相当自如得体。但是在传统治疗师眼里，“患者”身份的受访者明显更加不安。兰格指出，这说明，即使训练有素的观察者“也很容易被标签搞得没头没脑”。

If people could learn to be mindful and always perceive the choices available to them, Langer says, they would fulfill their potential and improve their health. Langer’s technique of achieving a state of mindfulness is different from the one often utilized in Eastern “mindfulness meditation” — nonjudgmental awareness of the thoughts and feelings drifting through your mind — that is everywhere today. Her emphasis is on noticing moment-to-moment changes around you, from the differences in the face of your spouse across the breakfast table to the variability of your asthma symptoms. When we are “actively making new distinctions, rather than relying on habitual” categorizations, we’re alive; and when we’re alive, we can improve. Indeed, “well-being and enhanced performance” were Langer’s goals from the beginning of her career.
兰格表示，如果人们能够学会多留点心，始终察觉到身边可以把握的选择，那么，他们将能充分发挥自己的潜能，并改善自己的健康。兰格所说的达到专注状态的技巧与在当今大行其道的东方式“正念禅修”不同，后者是对你的脑海中飘过的思想和感受达到不加评判的认知。而兰格强调的是留心你身边每时每刻的细微变化，从早餐桌对面配偶脸色的差异，到你的哮喘症状的改变。当我们在“积极主动发现新的差别，而不是依赖于习惯性的”分类时，我们会真正觉得自己活着；而当我们觉得自己活着，我们就能改善。的确，在职业生涯伊始，兰格就以“福祉和增强的表现”为目标。

Martin Seligman in the past two decades has come to be recognized as the father of positive psychology. Tal Ben-Shahar, who taught a popular undergraduate course at Harvard on the subject until 2008, calls Langer “the mother of positive psychology,” by virtue of her early work that anticipated the field.
过去20年里，马丁·赛里格曼(Martin Seligman)被公认为积极心理学之父。而凭借其在该领域的早期研究工作，兰格被2008年之前在哈佛大学讲授一门深受欢迎的本科课程的塔尔·班夏哈(Tal Ben-Shahar)誉为“积极心理学之母”。

Langer came to believe that one way to enhance well-being was to use all sorts of placebos. Placebos aren’t just sugar pills disguised as medicine, though that’s the literal definition; they are any intervention, benign but believed by the recipient to be potent, that produces measurable physiological changes. Placebo effects are a striking phenomenon and still not all that well understood. Entire fields like psychoneuroimmunology and psychoendocrinology have emerged to investigate the relationship between psychological and physiological processes. Neuroscientists are charting what’s going on in the brain when expectations alone reduce pain or relieve Parkinson’s symptoms. More traditionally minded health researchers acknowledge the role of placebo effects and account for them in their experiments. But Langer goes well beyond that. She thinks they’re huge — so huge that in many cases they may actually be the main factor producing the results.
兰格认为，增强福祉的途径之一是利用各种各样的安慰剂。安慰剂并不只是伪装成药物的糖丸（尽管那确实是字面上的定义）；没有危害、接受者相信有效，能够产生可测量的生理变化的任何干预措施都可称为安慰剂。安慰剂效应是一种引人注目的现象，至今仍未获得很好的理解。目前已经涌现出了心理神经免疫学和精神内分泌学等完整的研究领域，专门探讨心理与生理过程之间的关系。神经科学家试图跟踪记录当仅凭期望就减轻疼痛或缓解帕金森氏病症状时，大脑中究竟发生了哪些变化。意识较为传统的医学研究人员承认安慰剂效应的作用，并在自己的实验中计入这些效应。但兰格走得更远。她认为，安慰剂效应是巨大的——在许多情况下，它们实际上可能是产生结果的主要因素。

As an example, she points to a study she conducted in a hair salon in 2009. She got the idea from a study undertaken nearly a decade earlier by three scientists who looked at more than 4,000 subjects over two decades and found that men who were bald when they joined the study were more likely to develop prostate cancer than men who kept their hair. The researchers couldn’t be sure what explained the link, though they suspected that androgens (male hormones including testosterone) could be affecting both scalp and prostate. Langer had another theory: “Baldness is a cue for old age,” she says. “Therefore, men who go bald early in life may perceive themselves as older and may consequently be expected to age more quickly.” And those expectations may actually lead them to experience the effects of aging. To explore this relationship between expectations of aging and physiological signs of health, Langer and her colleagues designed the hair-salon study. They had research assistants approach 47 women, ranging in age from 27 to 83, who were about to have their hair cut, colored or both. They took blood-pressure readings. After the subjects’ hair was done, they filled out a questionnaire about how they felt they looked, and their blood pressure was taken again. In a paper published in 2010 in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, they reported that the subjects who perceived themselves as looking younger after the makeover experienced a drop in blood pressure.
她援引自己2009年在一家美发沙龙进行的研究作为例证。该研究的灵感来源于近10年前三位科学家进行的另一项研究，他们在20年期间追踪调查了4000多名受试者，发现在加入研究时秃顶的男性比头发丰茂的男性更容易患前列腺癌。研究人员不能肯定这种关联从何而来，但他们怀疑这也许是因为雄激素（包括睾酮）对头皮和前列腺都有影响。兰格则提出了另一种理论：“脱发是衰老的暗示之一。因此，早早秃顶的男性可能感觉自己更老，结果预期自己会更快衰老。”而这种预期实际上可能导致他们遭遇衰老效应。为了探讨对衰老的预期与健康的生理体征之间的这种关系，兰格和她的同事们设计了一项在美发沙龙进行的研究。他们让研究助理们去接触来美发沙龙剪发、染发或者先剪后染的47名女性（其年龄从27岁到83岁不等），并记录下她们的血压读数。受试者们做好发型之后，就各自对自己外貌的观感填写了一份调查问卷，并再次测量血压。在这篇2010年发表于《心理科学透视》(Perspectives on Psychological Science)期刊的论文中，他们报告称，那些认为自己在做好发型后显得更加年轻的受试者血压有所下降。

A few years earlier, Langer and one of her students, Alia Crum, conducted a study, published in the journal Psychological Science, involving 84 hotel chambermaids. The maids had mostly reported that they didn’t get much exercise in a typical week. The researchers primed the experimental group to think differently about their work by informing them that cleaning rooms was fairly serious exercise — as much if not more than the surgeon general recommends. Once their expectations were shifted, those maids lost weight, relative to a control group (and also improved on other measures like body mass index and hip-to-waist ratio). All other factors were held constant. The only difference was the change in mind-set.
几年前，兰格和她的学生阿莉娅·克拉姆(Alia Crum)进行了一项研究，并发表在《心理科学》(Psychological Science)杂志上。该研究涉及84名酒店客房女服务员。她们大多报告称，自己在典型的一周工作期间没有什么锻炼机会。研究人员引导实验组的女服务员换一种心态看待自己的工作，告诉她们：打扫房间其实是一种强度不小的锻炼，运动量不比卫生局局长所建议的要少。在她们的预期改变后，这些女服务员的体重相对于对照组有所减轻（其他指标，如身体质量指数[BMI]和腰臀比也有所改善）。其他所有因素都保持恒定。唯一变化的只有受试者的心态。

Critics hunted for other explanations — statistical errors or subtle behavior changes in the weight-loss group that Langer hadn’t accounted for. Otherwise the outcome seemed to defy physics. “To which I would say, ‘There’s no discipline that is complete,’ ” Langer responds. “If current-day physics can’t explain these things, maybe there are changes that need to be made in physics.”
批评者寻找其他解释，如统计错误，或者兰格未能计入的体重下降组的细微行为变化。否则，那样的结果似乎有悖于物理学。“对此我想说，‘没有一个学科是绝对完美的’，”兰格回应道。“如果当代的物理学无法解释这些现象，也许是物理学本身需要一些改变了。”

In the course of her career, Langer says, she has written or co-written more than 200 studies, and she continues to churn out research at a striking pace. Just before winter break, in her final meeting with two dozen or so students and postdocs, Langer went around the table checking the progress of nearly 30 experiments, all of which manipulated subjects’ perceptions. Some used a special clock that could be set to run at half-speed or double-speed. In one study, sleeping subjects were fooled, upon awakening, into thinking they had more or less sleep than they actually did. She posits that the scores on measures of short-term memory and reaction time will vary accordingly, regardless of how long the subjects actually slept. In a yet-to-be-published diabetes study, Langer wondered whether the biochemistry of Type 2 diabetics could be manipulated by the same psychological intervention — the subjects’ perception of how much time had passed. Her theory was that the diabetics’ blood-glucose levels would follow perceived time rather than actual time; in other words, they would spike and dip when the subjects expected them to. And that’s what her data revealed. When a student emailed her with the results this fall, she could barely contain her excitement. “This is the beginning of a psychological cure for diabetes!” she told me.
兰格说，在她的职业生涯中，她已经独立撰写或与他人合作撰写了200多篇研究论文，如今她继续以惊人的速度发表大量研究。就在寒假前，她与二十多个学生和博士后最后一次开会时，兰格围着桌子检查着近30项实验的进展，这些实验都涉及操纵受试者的感知。一些实验使用了特制的时钟，这些钟能够以正常时钟的一半速度或者两倍速度运转。在某一项研究中，受试者一觉醒来后受到蒙骗，让他们以为自己睡得比实际时间更久或者更短。兰格设想，这些受试者的短期记忆和反应时间等指标的得分将发生相应变化，而无论他们的实际睡眠时间有多长。在一项尚未发表的糖尿病研究中，兰格想知道2型糖尿病患者的生化检查结果是否也能通过同样的心理干预——即受试者对于已经过去了多长时间的感知——来操纵。她的理论是，糖尿病人血糖水平会跟随受试者感知到的时间（而不是实际时间）波动；换句话说，它会按照受试者的预期上升或者下降。而实验数据揭示的情况正是这样。今年秋天，当学生通过电子邮件向她报告实验结果时，她几乎无法抑制自己内心的激动。她告诉我说：“这是用心理疗法治疗糖尿病的开端！”

Some of the new experiments rely on variables that change self-perception. In a study using avatars, scheduled to take place at the popular gaming facility Second Life, subjects will watch a digital version of themselves playing tennis and gradually getting thinner from the exertion. Langer is exploring whether watching an avatar will have a physiological effect on the real person. “You see yourself, you’re playing tennis,” Langer said. “The question is: Will people lose weight? We’ll see.”
有些新实验依赖于改变自我感知的变量。在一项拟在流行的虚拟游戏世界“第二人生”(Second Life)中进行的研究中，受试者将观看自己的数字化身打网球，并因为体力消耗而逐渐变得苗条起来。兰格希望研究观察化身会否对真人造成生理影响。“你看到自己在打网球，”兰格说。“问题是：人们会因此减肥么？我们拭目以待。”

Some of Langer’s colleagues in the academy see her as a valuable force in psychology, praising her eccentric intelligence and ingenious study designs. Steven Pinker, the writer and Harvard professor, told me that she filled an important niche within the school’s department, which has often harbored “mavericks with nontraditional projects,” including “B. F. Skinner’s utopian novels and manifestoes and Herb Kelman’s encounter groups between Arab and Israeli activists — not to mention Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert,” who would become Ram Dass.
兰格在学术圈内的一些同事肯定了她在心理学领域的价值和影响力，赞赏她的独到智慧和巧妙研究设计。哈佛大学教授和作家史蒂文·平克(Steven Pinker)告诉我，她在学院内部占有重要的一席之地，该学院经常孕育出“搞出非传统项目的特立独行者”，包括“伯尔赫斯·弗雷德里克·斯金纳(B. F. Skinner)的乌托邦小说和宣言、赫布·克尔曼(Herb Kelman)组织的让阿拉伯与以色列活动人士汇聚一堂的会心小组——更不用说蒂莫西·利里(Timothy Leary)和理查德·阿尔珀特（Richard Alpert，已更名为拉姆·达斯[Ram Dass]）了。”