Blood Pressure, Heart Rate, and Stress

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Blood Pressure, Heart Rate, and Stress

• Daniel Cephas

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Blood Pressure

• Systolic BP
• Refers to the pressure exerted on arterial walls
  during ventricular contraction of the heart
  muscle.
• Diastolic BP
• Related to ventricular diastole or resting of the
  heart muscle.

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Stress

• Defined by Hans Selye(1976)
• Stress
• stress is the nonspecific response of he body to
  any demand
• Bad Stress and Good stress
• Good stress Eustress
• Bad stress Distress
• Both lead to bodily changes in HR and BP

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Stress (continued)

• Stressors
• Fear, Anger, Frustration, Competition,
  Motivation
• Frustration and Aggression
• Gentry(1970)
• Study to test if both frustration and aggression
  increased levels of systolic and diastolic blood
  pressure.
• Males greater increase in systolic pressure than
  women.

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Stress (continued)

• Naturalistic Stress
• Matthews, Manuck, and Saab(1986)
• Used a 5 min speech in class to evaluate
  cardiovascular response in anxious and in angry
  high school students.
• Anxious students showed elevated systolic BP and
  HR while giving speech.
• Frequently angry students had elevated Diastolic
  BP

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Stress (Continued)

• Socioeconomic Status
• Steptoe and Colleagues(2003)
• Sample of men and women aged 47-59 put through
  two stressful tasks, color-word interference and
  Mirror tracing.
• Divided by occupation into High-, middle-,
  low-SES
• Cardiac output and peripheral resistance greater
  increase in BP during tasks.
• BP peripheral resistance still high during 45
  Second resting period, cardiac output below
  baseline levels.

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Stress (continued)

• Low-SES group had especially high levels of
  peripheral resistance.
• Greater chronic stress leads to differences in
  vascular activity during study period.
• Marital Stress
• Research suggests women are especially sensitive
  to negative marital events than men.
• Carels and Associates(2000)
• Hypothesis- Greater marital distress associated
  with elevated BP at home and not in the
  workplace.

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Stress (continued)

• 50 married employed women aged 25-45 years.
• Blood pressure monitored during work day.
• Divided into equal numbers of high- and
  low-marital-stress.
• Women with high levels of marital distress were
  found to have greater negative emotion, and
  higher levels of BP at home.

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Stress (continued)

• Crowding
• Datri, Fitzgerald, Kasl, and Malinow(1981)
• Effects of crowding housing on BP of 568 inmates
• Prisoner- average age 25 years old, found to have
  significant increase of systolic BP when
  transferred from single occupancies to
  multiple-occupancy dormitories.

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Stress

• Pets
• Studies have shown that presence of a dog has
  been found to lower BP
• Friedmann, Katcher, Thomas, Lynch, and
  Massent(1983)
• 9-16 year olds had BP and HR measured while
  resting or reading wth friendly animal present.
• Dog presence lowered BP and HR in all conditions.