Comparison of Physiological Responses to Different Types of Mental Stress

摘要

The purposes of the present study were to examine cardiovascular responses to different mental stresses and to verify the shifting hemodynamics of blood pressure (BP) during mental stress. We presented a 20-min mental addition task (MA: intellectual stress) and a 20-min white noise (WN: emotional stress) to 8 healthy males and recorded the cardiovascular responses continually. The subjects' BP increased during the stress period for both the MA task and WN exposure. During elevated BP, however, the two stresses showed different effects. The MA task increased both cardiac and vascular responses. The WN exposure increased the vascular response, but the cardiac responses changed very little throughout the exposure period. In addition, during the MA task, the cardiac response of the latter part of the task (11～20 min of the task period) were significantly higher than those during the first part of the task (1～10 min of the task period). These results suggested that the intellectual stress had a cumulative effect on the cardiovascular system during the task period. The emotional stress, however, did not show significant shift during the exposure period.