Psychophysiological Effects of Interviews About Emotional Events on Offspring of Hypertensives and Normotensives

Normotensive individuals with a parental history of hypertension have been found to exhibit greater cardiovascular reactivity to a variety of laboratory stressors than offspring of normotensives. To examine the possible generalization of these differences to real-life stressors, subjects were administered four brief interviews about different emotional events in their lives. Regardless of emotional content, offspring of hypertensives displayed greater systolic blood pressure responses to the non-verbal recollection and verbal description of personal emotional events, but not to the imagination of standardized emotional scenes or reading a non-emotional advertisement. This suggests that group differences in reactivity may generalize to real-world situations. Evidence of significantly greater vasoconstriction during interviews about sad topics was also observed, contributing to the literature on the physiological differentiation of emotional states.