Cardiovascular emotional dampening and automatic affective processing: evidence from the Affect Misattribution Procedure across blood pressure groups

Cardiovascular emotional dampening (CED) refers to reduced emotional responsiveness associated with elevated blood pressure (BP). While prior studies have documented dampening in explicit and semi-implicit emotion recognition tasks, it remains unclear whether such effects extend to earlier, automatic stages of affective processing. The present study addressed this gap using the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), which captures automatic affective responses by assessing how emotional primes influence evaluations of neutral targets. A total of 176 participants (hypotensive, normotensive, prehypertensive, and hypertensive) completed two AMP tasks involving facial and scene-based emotional cues. Mixed-design ANCOVAs controlling for age, sex, education, and affectivity revealed a significant Emotion × BP group interaction for the scene-based (IAAPS) task but not for the facial task. Hypotensives rated both neutral and unpleasant primes more negatively than normotensives, indicating a negativity-tilted affective bias, whereas prehypertensive and hypertensive groups did not differ significantly from normotensives. These findings suggest that cardiovascular emotional dampening does not manifest uniformly across processing stages: while explicit emotion recognition deficits are evident at higher BP, automatic affective responding remains largely preserved, with heightened negativity evident at lower BP. The findings provide preliminary evidence that associations between cardiovascular status and automatic affective evaluation may depend on task demands and stimulus characteristics, rather than reflecting uniform emotional dampening across contexts.