Hostility and anger in: Cardiovascular reactivity and recovery to mental arithmetic stress

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2009.01.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Background

Hostility and anger have been attributed as psychosocial risk factors for coronary heart disease. Heightened cardiovascular reactivity (CVR), and poor recovery, to provocative stressors are thought to hasten this risk.

Purpose

To examine the relationship between hostility and anger inhibition (AI), and the moderating situational influences of harassment and evaluation, in predicting CVR and recovery to mental arithmetic (MA) stress using a multiple regression approach.

Methods

48 male undergraduate students engaged in the following 3 minute tasks during recording of the electrocardiogram, impedance cardiography, and blood pressure: baseline, MA, and evaluation. Hostility and AI were assessed with the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale and the Speilberger Anger In subscale, respectively.

Results

An interaction between hostility and AI showed high diastolic blood pressure reactivity to the MA task among hostile anger inhibitors. Harassment did not modify this effect. However, harasser evaluation predicted prolonged systolic blood pressure (SBP) responding among men scoring high in AI, and facilitated SBP recovery among those scoring low on AI.

Conclusions

The findings highlight the interactive influences of AI and hostility in predicting CVR to stress and underscore the importance of recovery assessments in understanding the potentially pathogenic associations of these constructs.

Section snippets

Participants

Forty eight healthy male undergraduate psychology students (M = 19.38, SD = 1.67 years; range: 18–27 years) at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech) were recruited from on-line advertisements posted on their Psychology Department Experiment Management System. This study received approval from the institutional review board at Virginia Tech. The sample consisted of individuals of Caucasian (85.4%), Asian American (10.4%), and African American (4.2%) ethnicities and

Preliminary analyses

Baseline CV measures did not vary as a function of hostility or AI. Repeated measures ANOVA's showed significant changes from baseline to MA task on all CV measures except the LF/HF ratio, for which there was a marginal effect: increases were observed for HR, F(1, 46) = 166.43, p < .001; SBP, F(1, 46) = 117.78, p < .001; DBP, F(1, 46) = 79.55, p < .001; and LF/HF ratio, F(1, 46) = 3.85, p = .056; and decreases were observed for PEP, F(1, 46) = 30.71, p < .001; and HF, F(1, 46) = 16.33, p < .001 (see Table 1).

Discussion

The aim of the current study was to examine the relationship between hostility and AI, and the potentially moderating situational influences of harassment and evaluation in predicting CVR and recovery to MA stress. The findings regarding the first hypothesis of hostility interacting with AI levels to predict exaggerated CV responses to harassment induced stress were mixed. Consistent with the defensive hostility literature (Jorgenson et al., 1995, Larson and Langer, 1997), men scoring high in

Acknowledgements

These data were collected in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Tech. The authors would like to thank Jeffrey Elcano, Thomas Evans, and Michael Sweet for assistance in data collection, and Israel Christie for technical assistance. Portions of these data were presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (2005), the Society for Behavioral Medicine (2006), and the Association for Psychological Science (2006).

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