Why the study?
Does patient gender and presence of psychological stress affect the attribution of cardiac-related symptoms by observers?
Does patient gender and presence of psychological stress affect the attribution of cardiac-related symptoms by observers?
Stereotypes associating heart disease with male gender and psychological stress with female symptoms may lead to under-recognition of cardiac symptoms in women.
Gender-stress stereotypes may bias cardiac symptom attribution in women; hypothesis-generating for observer effects on real-world diagnosis.
The role of common sense models of heart disease in the attribution of cardiac-related symptoms was examined in a sample of healthy young adults (N = 224). Participants were less likely to attribute symptoms to possible cardiac causes for female victims reporting stressful life events (M = 5.14) than for female victims without such stressors (M = 6.82) or for male victims with (M = 6.23) or without (M = 6.48) concurrent stressors. Cardiac attributions remained lowest for female/high-stress victims in additional samples of undergraduates (N = 194), community-residing adults (N = 48), and physicians (N = 45), although this outcome sometimes appeared to reflect additive, rather than interactive, effects. Two final experiments with undergraduate samples (Ns = 48 and 60, respectively) indicated that stereotypes associating heart disease with male gender may account for gender disparities in the attribution of cardiac-related symptoms.
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Martin et al. (1998) studied this question.
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