Does cardiovascular reactivity to asocial stress predict reactivity to social stress in fathers, mothers, and adolescent sons?
Cardiovascular reactivity to asocial stress does not reliably predict reactivity to social stress, suggesting social stress should be measured directly when assessing cardiovascular risk.
The authors tested the generalizability of measures of cardiovascular reactivity to asocial and social stress among fathers, mothers, and their adolescent sons. Results showed significant associations between reactivity to individual psychomotor tasks and to conflict resolution only for mothers, suggesting that laboratory measures of reactivity obtained during asocial tasks are of limited value in predicting reactivity during social tasks. Given that interpersonal constructs are important to risk for cardiovascular diseases, these findings point to the importance of measuring cardiovascular reactivity during social stress, not only during asocial achievement stress.
Lassner et al. (Sat,) studied this question.