Why the study?
Are elevated blood pressure and essential hypertension associated with specific personality traits such as affect expression, negative affectivity, and defensiveness?
Are elevated blood pressure and essential hypertension associated with specific personality traits such as affect expression, negative affectivity, and defensiveness?
The traditional view of personality directly causing essential hypertension is untenable, highlighting the need for multifactorial approaches to understand the association between personality and blood pressure.
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Challenges direct personality causation of hypertension; supports multifactorial models incorporating moderators like gender and awareness.
A meta-analysis of 295 relevant effect sizes obtained from 25,469 participants confirmed expectations that elevated blood pressure (BP) and essential hypertension (EH) would be associated with lower affect expression but with more negative affectivity and defensiveness. The strongest associations occurred for defensiveness and measures of anger and affect expression linked to an interpersonal context(s). However, a number of other factors also were found to moderate associations of BP with personality measures, including awareness of BP status, gender, occupation, and diastolic versus systolic BP assessment. Given these moderators, the authors conclude that a traditional view of personality causing EH is untenable and that, not incorporating multifactorial, synergistic approaches is likely to obscure associations of personality-behavior with EH.
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Johnson et al. (1996) studied this question.
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