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Hughes, B. M., & Howard, S. (2012). Repressive coping assists short-term, but not longer-term, hemodynamic adaptation to recurrent laboratory stress. 70th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society, Athens, Greece, March.

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Abstract. Repressive coping style is an important psychosomatic typology, indicative of elevated risk of cardiovascular (CV) disease. Importantly, repressive coping results in subjective assessments of health risks that diverge from reality. By appraising challenges as less stressful, persons classified as repressors may derive short-term health benefits in terms of reduced physiological stress arousal. However, while reporting less emotional stress, repressors also exhibit higher rates of CV disease, typically seen as indicative of stress susceptibility. To elucidate the impact of repressive coping on primary disease mechanisms, we tested whether repressors differ from sensitizers in CV stress responding. 30 repressors and 32 sensitizers were drawn from a screening sample of 105 healthy college women, and exposed to standardized laboratory-based CV reactivity assessment. In order to examine time effects, analyses were based on CV responses across two consecutive stress exposures. CV responses were examined in terms of reciprocal balancing of CO against TPR. MANOVA demonstrated significant group differences for CV responses to the first stress exposure, F(2,59) = 3.35, p = .042, with repressors showing greater CO increases F(1,60) = 5.22, p = .026, and TPR decreases F(1,60) = 4.15, p = .046, than sensitizers. This CO-TPR pattern implies a more accentuated healthful hemodynamic-level response among repressors. However, group effects disappeared during the second stress exposure, F(2,57) = 1.18, p = .316, suggesting that the difference was short-lasting. Instead, over time, repressors exhibited slightly higher overall CV arousal than sensitizers, when measured in terms of HR, F(1,60) = 5.69, p = .020. These findings provide empirical support for the assertion that repressors experience an advantage in terms of adaptive acute stress responses (where hemodynamic profile is optimized in the short-term) but maladaptive longer-term impacts on CV health (as indicated by elevated CV arousal).

 

 

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