Temporal Heart-Rate Patterns in Anxious Patients

This report demonstrates an approach to the problem of describing pattern in repeated measurements and presents the result of an investigation of heart-rate patterns in a group of anxious patients. We attempted to answer two questions: Are there subgroupings among subjects in heart-rate patterns, and, if there are, do these groupings of subjects differ in other variables studied? These problems were approached within the context of a larger study of concomitant variation of affective, psychological, and physiological functioning under the impact of experimentally produced anxiety, conducted at the Institute for Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Research and Training of Michael Reese Hospital over the past three years. A complete description of the theory and methodology underlying the large study may be found elsewhere.1 Subjects and Procedure The subjects were 19 adults, 13 men and 6 women, ranging in age from 22 to 57 years, with a mean age of 39, all