Why the study?
Do defensiveness and cynical hostility interact to predict cardiovascular reactivity to a stressful mental arithmetic task?
Do defensiveness and cynical hostility interact to predict cardiovascular reactivity to a stressful mental arithmetic task?
The combination of high defensiveness and cynical hostility is associated with increased cardiovascular reactivity to stress, potentially linking these psychological traits to coronary disease risk.
May link combined traits to heightened reactivity; hypothesis-generating for coronary risk pathways, pending prospective trials.
We examined the interaction of a defensive need for approval with cynical hostility, in the prediction of pressor and heart rate reactivity to a stressful mental arithmetic task. For both systolic blood pressure and heart rate, analyses revealed the predicted interaction between defensiveness and cynical hostility; subsequent analyses showed significant correlations of defensiveness with systolic blood pressure and heart rate reactivity only among the high cynical hostility subjects. These analyses support the theory and empirical findings linking the conflicting traits of cynical hostility and defensiveness to cardiovascular reactivity and, quite possibly, to stress-related coronary disease.
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Jorgensen et al. (2010) studied this question.
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