A new study suggests that lonely people get sicker from the common cold than people who are less lonely.

According to new research, that crummy, achy, sneezy feeling you get when you have a cold is worse if you are also feeling lonely.

In the study, published last week in the American Psychological Association’s journal Health Psychology, the authors report that lonelier people complained of 38.5 percent more severe symptoms than those who were less lonely.

Previous research has shown that loneliness is associated with negative health outcomes in chronic diseases such as cancer and heart disease, but nobody had looked at whether it also played a role in the outcomes of more common illnesses like the cold — until now.

“We wanted to see if there would be a similar effect with an everyday illness that we all experience,” said Angie Le Roy, a graduate student at the University of Houston who led the work.

To find out, Le Roy and her colleagues recruited 213 individuals who agreed to be infected with rhinovirus 39 — a common cold virus. (Yes, they were paid. Participants received $1,060 for completing the study.)

The researchers used nasal drops to give participants the cold. Those who were infected (160 out of the original 213) were quarantined in individual hotel rooms for five days. During this time they received three meals per day in their room and had only minimal contact with other volunteers and the people running the study. They also recorded their cold symptoms each day.

When the authors crunched the data, they found that lonelier people reported worse cold symptoms.

To test if lonely people actually had worse colds than less lonely people, one of Le Roy’s collaborators had the unpleasant task of gathering all the dirty tissues used over the course of the experiment and weighing them to see how much mucus each participant produced.

The authors report that there was the same amount of mucus in the tissues of lonely people and less lonely people, suggesting that loneliness is not associated with an objective common cold indicator of mucus production.

“The perception of how they felt was the effect we found,” Le Roy said.

But keep in mind, it’s the perception of “not feeling well” and not necessarily how objectively sick we are. And that has serious economic effects. The authors cite a 2002 study that found that the economic cost of productivity that can be blamed on the common cold is close to $25 billion.