Why the study?
Does preconscious affective bias to threatening facial stimuli correlate with cardiovascular stress-reactivity in healthy individuals?
Does preconscious affective bias to threatening facial stimuli correlate with cardiovascular stress-reactivity in healthy individuals?
A preconscious bias toward perceiving angry faces is associated with exaggerated blood pressure reactivity to stress, suggesting a potential neurobehavioral marker for essential hypertension risk.
Preconscious bias to angry faces was associated with exaggerated BP reactivity; hypothesis-generating for hypertension risk markers and needs prospective confirmation.
AIM: To investigate cardiovascular stress-reactivity in association with individual preconscious affective biases to threatening and appetitive facial stimuli. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Preconscious affective biases were assessed in healthy individuals (n = 38, mean age 28, 10 years, 1SD = 8.64) using a modified (masked) version of a pictorial emotional Stroop task (backward masking of the angry, fearful and joyful faces). RESULTS: It was revealed that individual preconscious bias to speeded up perception of angry faces correlates significantly with heightened anxiety, lowered platelet serotonin (5-HT) levels, sustained central overactivation of at rest (as indexed by lowered delta, theta, and beta-1 EEG power over frontal, central and posterior cortical areas) and exaggerated arterial blood pressure stress-reactivity during re-experiencing of personally relevant anger. CONCLUSIONS: considering uncovered associations, individuals with preconscious bias to speeded up perception of angry faces may be regarded as having enhanced risk to fall sick with essential hypertension, yet this perceptive bias could be seen as a putative neurobehavioral predictor of the risk.
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Aftanas et al. (2013) studied this question.
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