Hostility and Anger Expression: Behavioral and Cardiovascular Responses to Mental Stress Among Cardiovascular Disease Patients

摘要

Hostility and anger expression have been postulated as contributing factors to cardiovascular disease and have been associated with cardiovascular reactivity and stress-induced myocardial ischemia. The present research investigates relationships between hostility, anger expression, and defensiveness and cardiovascular measures of reactivity and ischemia. The study is an analysis of previously collected data from the Triggers of Myocardial Ischemia Study, in which participants underwent mental stress tasks (math, anger recall speech, and Stroop Color-Word) with concurrent assessments of cardiovascular reactivity and ischemia as well as brief emotional state assessments in the laboratory. Outside of the laboratory, a subset of these participants (n= 59) completed a set of questionnaires including the Marlowe- Crowne Scale of Social Desirability and the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale. Results indicated that higher Cook-Medley Hostility scores were positively correlated with anger expression changes following the math task (r=.308, p< .05), and Composite Hostility predicted anger expression changes to the same task (r=.334, p<.05). The Composite Hostility component Hostile Affect was a significant predictor of anger expression changes during all three tasks. Although hostility measures did not appear to be consistently predictive factors in stress-induced cardiovascular reactivity, changes in anger expression predicted systolic and diastolic blood pressure changes during the anger recall task, and marginally predicted heart rate changes to anger recall. Higher Total Hostility was marginally related to presence of ischemia during Anger Recall and Stroop tasks, but anger expression changes were not related to presence of ischemia.