A Comparison of Additional Heart Rates During Active Psychological Challenge Calculated From Upper Body and Lower Body Dynamic Exercise

Heart rate, oxygen consumption, and blood pressure were recorded while 22 young males performed a stressful mental arithmetic task and played a video game. Measurements were also made while subjects undertook two separate graded dynamic exercise tasks, an upper body and a lower body task. All measures changed as a function of psychological challenge, and during exercise heart rate and oxygen consumption changed as an orderly function of workload. For each subject, heart rate was plotted against oxygen consumption over the various workloads for each exercise task separately, thereby generating two regression lines per subject. In conjunction with oxygen consumption values during the psychological tasks, these regressions allowed the prediction of expected heart rate values during psychological challenge, and thus the computation of additional heart rate as the difference between actual heart rate and predicted heart rate. Actual heart rate during psychological challenge was substantially greater than predicted heart rate, i.e., there was considerable additional heart rate. This was the case irrespective of whether upper or lower body exercise was used to compute the predictions, and there was no significant difference between the additional heart rates generated from the two exercise tasks, which produced regression lines with similar slope and intercept values.