Blunted cardiovascular reactivity to acute psychological stress predicts low behavioral but not self-reported perseverance: A replication study

Blunted Cardiovascular Reactivity Predicts Worse Performance in Working Memory Tasks

When we experience psychological challenges in the environment, our heart rate usually rises to make us more able to solve the task, but there is an individual difference in cardiovascular reactivity (CVR). Extreme CVR to environmental demands has been associated with worse health outcomes, with blunted CVR (little or no rise in heart rate) related to maladaptive behavior, including depression. The blunted CVR has been explained by motivational disengagement, which involves giving up on a task when facing obstacles. Disengagement is thought to be a habitual response that people might not be aware of, and, therefore, objective measures such as test performance might serve as a good measure of engagement. In this study, 66 participants solved different cognitive tasks while their CVR was measured. The aim was to test the association between test performance and reactivity, measured with the difference in heart rate at baseline and the mean heart rate while solving the tasks. Our results show a significant association between reactivity scores and performance in all tests, of various difficulty, indicating that blunted cardiovascular reactivity predicts poorer cognitive performance. Furthermore, we find an association between reactivity in one test and the performance in the other tests, suggesting that disengagement from environmental demands can be more general and not depend on the task at hand. The results, therefore, support earlier research suggesting that blunted CVR is associated with worse cognitive performance, and extends the literature by indicating that disengagement could be a more general maladaptive response to the environment.

Cardiovascular reactions to acute psychological stress and academic achievement

Cardiovascular reactions to acute psychological stress have been associated with cognitive function. However, previous work has assessed cardiovascular reactions and cognitive function in the laboratory at the same time. The present study examined the association between cardiovascular reactions to acute psychological stress in the laboratory and academic performance in final year high school students. Heart rate, blood pressure, stroke volume, and cardiac output reactions to an acute psychological stress task were measured in 131 participants during their final year of high school. Performance on high school A‐levels were obtained the following year. Higher heart rate and cardiac output reactivity were associated with better A‐level performance. These associations were still statistically significant after adjusting for a wide range of potentially confounding variables. The present results are consistent with a body of literature suggesting that higher heart rate reactions to acute psychological stress are associated with better cognitive performance across a variety of domains.

The present study is the first to examine the associations between cardiovascular reactions to stress in the laboratory and academic achievement. Additionally, it is the first to examine a more comprehensive hemodynamic profile of cardiovascular reactivity (e.g., cardiac output) with cognitive function. The present results are consistent with a body of literature suggesting that higher heart rate reactions to acute psychological stress are associated with better cognitive performance across a variety of domains.

Blunted cardiovascular reactivity may serve as an index of psychological task disengagement in the motivated performance situations

Challenge and threat models predict that once individuals become engaged with performance, their evaluations and cardiovascular response determine further outcomes. Although the role of challenge and threat in predicting performance has been extensively tested, few studies have focused on task engagement. We aimed to investigate task engagement in performance at the psychological and physiological levels. We accounted for physiological task engagement by examining blunted cardiovascular reactivity, the third possible cardiovascular response to performance, in addition to the challenge/threat responses. We expected that low psychological task engagement would be related to blunted cardiovascular reactivity during the performance. Gamers (N = 241) completed five matches of the soccer video game FIFA 19. We recorded psychological task engagement, heart rate reactivity, and the difference between goals scored and conceded. Lower psychological task engagement was related to blunted heart rate reactivity during the performance. Furthermore, poorer performance in the previous game was related to increased task engagement in the subsequent match. The findings extend existing literature by providing initial evidence that blunted cardiovascular reactivity may serve as the index of low task engagement.