【已刪除】第二部份：非選題(60%) IV.考題設計 20% 
There is growing evidence that emotional health is as important as medical treatment and lifestyle in determining not only a person’s chances of surviving cancer, but of getting the disease in the first place.
Personality, in particular, so-called “type-A” characteristics such as aggression, has long been linked to heart disease. But doctors were more reluctant to associate emotional status with tumor growth, which involve a complicated breakdown of the immune system.
In the last four months, however, two well-received studies have been published that found women with breast cancer lived longer if they underwent group therapy or demonstrated a fighting spirit against the disease.
More controversial were three large-scale studies done in Germany and Hungary that found personality traits and stressful events were six times more likely to contribute a person’s likelihood of developing cancer than smoking, cholesterol levels, or any other medical or physical factors. The studies identified cancer-prone people as those who tend to be over-cooperative, unassertive, over-patient and conflict-avoiding, all attributes which make one vulnerable to stress.
These studies, published over the past 10 years, were designed by Dr. Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, a Yugoslav psychologist now working in Heidelberg, and at first received scant attention in the Western world. But Grossarth-Maticek gained considerable credibility in recent years from the support of Dr. Hans Eysenck, founder of the University of London’s Institute of Psychiatry and a world renowned psychologist. Last year, the two researchers published a study of 850 randomly chosen people who, on the basis of personality tests, were divided into four groups---those thought to be susceptible to cancer or to heart disease and those who did not show factors associated with two diseases, but differed in other ways. They divided in the same way another group of more than 1,000 people who suffered from marked stress, and followed up both groups ten years later.
Of the people under stress, 38.4 percent of the cancer-prone died of cancer, compared with less than two percent of the groups without heart or cancer-prone personalities. There were significantly more cancer deaths in the cancer-prone samples than coronary deaths among those characterized as susceptible to heart disease. “The results have very profound social and medical consequences,” Eysenck told a recent London conference on Cancer and the Mind. “One of our problems is…how to make use of this knowledge.”
Eysenck could not explain why personality plays a part in tumor growth, which is one reason many doctors remain cautious about interpreting the results of the studies. Some cancer specialists warn that, without more knowledge, such studies could do more harm than good. Cancer specialists are more encouraged by studies showing that therapy and a positive attitude can play a critical role, when coupled with medical treatment, in helping cancer patients fight the disease.
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