Difficulty as a determinant of cardiovascular response: moderating effect of instrumentality in an alleviation paradigm

Sex, outcome expectancy, and cardiovascular response to a masculine challenge

Male and female participants were led to believe they could secure a low or high chance of winning a prize by meeting a modest standard on a purportedly masculine task, that is, a task on which men ostensibly had higher ability. As expected, systolic blood pressure responses measured during performance were greater for women than men when the chance of winning was high, but low for both groups when the chance of winning was low. Similar effects were observed for diastolic and mean arterial pressure responses, although analysis of the mean arterial pressure data produced only a main effect for the chance factor. These results conceptually replicate cardiovascular findings obtained in a previous sex difference study. They also confirm the implication of previous ability perception studies that effort-related cardiovascular responses should be low for both sexes when the importance of meeting a gender-relevant challenge is low.

Relationship of socioeconomic markers to daily life ischemia and blood pressure reactivity in coronary artery disease patients

BACKGROUND

Socioeconomic status (SES) is an important predictor of clinical outcomes in patients with coronary artery disease (CAD).

PURPOSE

We hypothesized that a selected sample of low SES cardiac patients would display heightened cardiovascular stress responses in the laboratory and increased daily life ischemia compared to otherwise comparable higher SES patients.

METHODS

Eighty-two patients (M age=61.8+/-9.4 years; 71 men, 11 women) with a known history of CAD engaged in a stressful mental arithmetic task while blood pressure (BP) measures were collected. Myocardial ischemia was subsequently assessed via 48-hr ambulatory electrocardiographic monitoring in a subgroup of 51 patients. SES was defined by participants' residential block groups, which were linked to Census Bureau data about their neighborhood, including per capita income, percentage of the population below poverty, educational level, as well as self-report of number of years of education.

RESULTS

Contrary to expectation, high SES participants in the study displayed higher diastolic BP (p<.01) and systolic BP (p<.001) responses to mental stress in the laboratory.

CONCLUSIONS

Participants with daily life ischemia came from wealthier neighborhoods using indexes of poverty (p<.01), income (p<.02), and education (p<.04) compared to patients without ambulatory ischemia. This relationship was not accounted for by age, sex, race, body mass index, marital status, or measures of disease severity.

Social evaluation influence on cardiovascular response to a fixed behavioral challenge: effects across a range of difficulty levels

Participants performed five memory tasks--ranging in difficulty from very low to very high--under public or private conditions. The publicity and difficulty variables interacted to determine systolic pressure and heart rate responses during performance. Where performance was public, responsiveness on the parameters increased with difficulty to a point and then dropped; where performance was private, responsiveness was relatively low at all difficulty levels. Diastolic pressure responses were configured similarly, although in that case the interaction was not reliable. Findings corroborate and extend results from a previous study, argue against some explanations of those results, and strengthen the case for a recent active coping analysis of cardiovascular audience effects. Findings also strengthen the case for a broader model of effort and cardiovascular response, which has potential for advancing our understanding of a range of phenomena and processes related to behavior and health.