On states, traits, and processes: A transactional alternative to the individual difference assumptions in Type A behavior and physiological reactivity

Communication, Heart Rate and the Musical Dialogue

This article is concerned with a physiological investigation into what happens when two people play music together in a situation that is similar to that of music therapy. Active music therapy is a process of dialogue, with both therapist and patient as part of one musical process. In evaluations of music therapy the musical process is often emphasised, although the question remains as to what effect this musical process has on the body of the patient. In this paper we take this question one step further by asking what effect the musical process has on both partners in the process of playing improvised music. Such a perspective is not trivial. We expect that the therapeutic contact influences both therapist and patient. At the end of this paper we will hypothesise about the ramifications of this idea for other clinical encounters.

It is important, in explaining the benefit of music therapy to others, to know what happens when people improvise music together. Our intention is to be able to demonstrate the influence music therapy has on the physiology of the patient and the therapist. This is to accept not only the ramifications music has for mental well-being but also the physical effect that music therapy has on the patient's body. While music can be demonstrated to have a direct physical effect on the body, it is organisation, the non-material aspect, that is vital to communication both within the person and between persons (Aldridge 1996a). However, the ground from which we will argue is that music has the ability to bring about physical changes in the human body, an understanding that has been in our culture since antiquity (Aldridge 1993).

Depression as a Moderator of Relationships between Positive Daily Events and Day-to-Day Psychological Adjustment

For 21 days, 123 participants provided measures of their daily depressogenic adjustment, including Beck’s cognitive triad, causal uncertainty, control over the environment, self-esteem, and anxiety, and they described the positive and negative events that occurred. Daily adjustment negatively covaried with the number of negative events occurring each day and, except as measured by anxiety, positively covaried with positive events. The covariance between negative events and adjustment was stronger than the covariance between positive events and adjustment. Participants also provided measures of depressive symptoms. For the self-esteem and cognitive triad measures, adjustment covaried more strongly with negative and positive events for the depressed than they did for the nondepressed.

COMPARISON BETWEEN KUWAITI AND EGYPTIAN TEACHERS IN TYPE A BEHAVIOR AND JOB SATISFACTION: A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY

This study investigates the differences between males and females on the one hand, and between Egyptian and Kuwaiti teachers on the other. It also aims to examine the correlation between Type A behavior and job satisfaction. The sample consists of 406 teachers (109 females and 279 males; 253 Kuwaiti, 153 Egyptian). Tools used in this study are: Scales of Type Abehavior (Abdel-Khalek & Chukry, 1991), and job satisfaction (Cooper, Sloan, & Williams, 1998). Results reveal that there are no significant differences between males and females in Type A behavior, however there are significant differences between males and females in job satisfaction, organization structure, and satisfaction of organizational process. Results also reveal a significant difference between Kuwaiti and Egyptian teachers in the research variables. In addition to the above, results indicate significant positive correlations between Type A behavior and job satisfaction.

Contribution of education to health and life satisfaction in older adults mediated by negative affect

OBJECTIVES

The authors developed a model of relationships between two enduring attributes (educational attainment and negative affect) and two indicators of successful aging (health and life satisfaction).

METHODS

A probability sample of 1,177 participants (age 55 and older) were interviewed four times at 6-month intervals. Structural equation models were developed based on the authors' hypothetical model proposing a mediating effect of negative affect between health and successful aging.

RESULTS

As predicted, education and negative affect both were directly related to health and life satisfaction. Also, as predicted, negative affect mediated the relationship between education and successful aging indicators.

DISCUSSION

Education appears to confer a lifelong advantage for healthy aging. Part of this advantage is accounted for by the relationship between education and trait negative affect. Higher educational attainment is related to lower levels of trait negative affect; lower negative affect results in better health and life satisfaction.

Social psychophysiology, social circumstances, and health

Health varies markedly with social circumstances. While we are still without a comprehensive account of the mechanisms which underlie this variation, it is clear that psychological factors are involved and that key pathways may prove to be psychophysiological. Thus, social psychophysiological research of the kind illustrated in this Special Issue is ideally placed to help unravel some of the mechanisms by which social circumstances impact on health. Nevertheless, the success of this sort of social psychophysiological enterprise most likely depends on reconceptualizing psychophysiological reactivity as a situational, or psychological exposure, concept rather than as an individual difference concept. This shifts the research goal from one of identifying individuals at risk for disease to identifying the psychological exposures that put individuals and groups at risk.

Social support and hostility as predictors of depressive symptoms in cardiac patients one month after hospitalization: a prospective study

OBJECTIVE

Hospitalization for cardiac disease is associated with an increased risk for depression, which itself confers a poorer prognosis. Few prospective studies have examined the determinants of depression after hospitalization in cardiac patients, and even fewer have examined depression within the weeks after hospital discharge. The present study assessed the prospective relations among perceptions of social support and trait hostility in predicting symptoms of depressive symptoms at 1 month after hospitalization for a diagnostic angiography in 506 coronary artery disease (CAD) patients.

METHOD

A series of structural equation models 1) estimated the predictive relations of social support, hostility, and depressive symptoms while in the hospital to symptoms of depression 1 month after hospitalization, and 2) compared these relations across gender, predicted risk classification, and age.

RESULTS

Social support assessed during hospitalization was independently negatively associated with depressive symptoms 1 month after hospitalization, after controlling for baseline symptoms of depression, gender, disease severity, and age. Hostility was an indirect predictor of postdischarge depressive symptomology by way of its negative relation with social support. This pattern of relations did not differ across gender, predicted risk classification, and age.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings suggest that a patient's perceived social support during hospitalization is a determinant of depressive symptoms 1 month later. The relation of social support and hostility to subsequent depressive symptoms was similar across a variety of populations.

Challenge and type A scorers: implications of situational consistency and control

A transactional approach to Type A behavior was examined using a computer-editing task. 39 men and 47 women were assigned to treatment conditions involving either a fast, inconsistent, or slow computer-system response time. High scores on Type A and Competitiveness measures of the Jenkins Activity Survey were associated with users' briefer response times during fast and slow conditions. High scores on Competitiveness were associated with increased (post- minus pretask) state-anxiety scores during the fast condition and with decreased state-anxiety scores during the slow condition. Type A behavior scores were uncorrelated to subjects' response times or emotional reactivity during the inconsistent condition. Implications of situational predictability and control for Type A behavior pattern were discussed.

Personality and the problems of everyday life: the role of neuroticism in exposure and reactivity to daily stressors

This article investigates mechanisms through which neuroticism leads to distress in daily life. Neuroticism may lead to distress through exposing people to a greater number of stressful events, through increasing their reactivity to those events, or through a mechanism unrelated to environmental events. This article evaluates the relative importance of these three explanations. Subjects were 339 persons who provided daily reports of minor stressful events and mood for 6 weeks. Exposure and reactivity to these minor stressors explained over 40% of the distress difference between high- and low-neuroticism subjects. Reactivity to stressors accounted for twice as much of the distress difference as exposure to stressors. These results suggest that reactions within stressful situations are more important than situation selection in explaining how neuroticism leads to distress in daily life.

The Type A city: coronary heart disease and the pace of life

The relationship between the pace of life and coronary heart disease (CHD) was examined in a total of 36 small, medium, and large metropolitan areas across the United States. Four indicators of pace were observed: walking speed, articulation rate (talking speed), bank teller speed (work speed), and the proportion of individuals wearing watches (concern with clock time). Pace of life was strongly related to death rates from coronary heart disease both across cities and across regions of the country. This provides support, on a sociological level, for Wright's (1988) contention that time urgency is a toxic element of the Type A behavior pattern. It is proposed that individuals living in fast-paced cities may be more prone to unhealthy behaviors (e.g., cigarette smoking), which place them at a greater risk for CHD. The relationship among cities' temporal norms, Type A time urgency, and coronary heart disease is also discussed.

Type A personality, self-control, and vulnerability to stress

Type A behavior (hard-driving, competitive, time-urgent, hostile-irritable) has been linked to high stress levels and the risk of eventual cardiovascular problems (i.e., coronary heart disease, CHD). However, this pattern of behavior closely resembles the traditional masculine instrumental (goal-oriented) orientation, and, if kept within limits, may be viewed as adaptive in success-oriented, middle-class college students. Hypothetically then, Type A behavior may be displayed by a broad group of individuals, and only in those cases when it is allowed to reach extreme proportions is stress sufficient enough to confer risk. This article considers two lines of reasoning. Is greater self-control required for college women to be Type As, because it involves crossing into traditional male role behavior? Type A women displayed significantly better self-control then Type B women; the opposite result was disclosed for college men with Type As displaying poorer self-control than Type Bs. The question of whether risk-conferring Type A behavior would result from poorer self-control was answered in the affirmative. Self-control assumed moderator status; poorer self-control in both male and female Type As was associated with high levels of day-to-day stress relative to Type As with better self-control. Self-control did not influence stress level in Type Bs. This moderator effect suggests that only Type As who cannot contain their behavior within adaptive limits will be vulnerable to excessive stress and at risk for CHD.

Personality and health in the 1980s: psychosomatic medicine revisited?

This special issue is a sign of a resurgence of interest in the role of personality in health not seen since the 1940s and early 1950s when the promises of the psychosomatic approach to health and illness appeared to be the greatest. This new look at personality and health represented by contributions to this special issue attempts to address the limitations of earlier work in psychosomatic medicine by making more explicit efforts to define personality variables precisely, to distinguish these variables from conceptually related psychological constructs, and to embed them in a body of theory and empirical research. This new work also attempts to remedy methodological limitations of earlier work by placing greater emphasis on prospective research and highlighting distinctions between symptom reports, illness behavior, and actual illness. However, the new work and earlier work in psychosomatic medicine share certain working assumptions, for example, a primary emphasis on the relatively direct impact of personality on disease onset, an assumption that personality variables operate in interaction with stressful events, and a frequent emphasis on general susceptibility to disease. Moreover, this new work frequently risks the same methodological pitfalls that limited scientific progress in psychosomatic medicine. We argue that the rapid rise and decline of psychosomatic medicine is most likely to be repeated in research on personality and health in the 1980s if reasonable criteria for considering personality variables a risk factor for disease are not precisely defined, disease endpoints (the dependent variable) are not assessed precisely, personality variables of interest (the independent variable) are not empirically distinguished from other related psychological variables, and complex relationships among risk factors are not taken into account. It is emphasized that models drawn from personality research cannot be transferred unchanged to the health arena without risking false inferences about the role of personality in health.