Psychosomatic medicine
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Psychosomatic medicine · Sep 1996
Emotional reactivity, defensiveness, and ambulatory cardiovascular response at work.
To examine whether individual differences in dispositional emotional reactivity (ER), denoting a proneness to sustained emotional arousal in the face of stressful events, are associated with tension arousal and cardiovascular (CV) response at work, and whether this association is modified by defensive coping. ⋯ Both high ER and low defensiveness were independently shown to be effective in identifying persons who might display recurrent tension arousal and pressure responses at work as well as high baseline BP values. When considering both baseline and ambulatory BP values, nondefensive/high ERS appear to be at greatest CV risk.
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Psychosomatic medicine · Jul 1996
The influence of resting blood pressure and gender on pain responses.
Recent research suggests that resting blood pressure is inversely related to pain sensitivity, even among normotensives; however, most of these studies have included only male participants. To determine whether this hypoalgesic effect of blood pressure was also present in females, we investigated thermal and ischemic pain responses in a group of age-matched, normotensive females and males as a function of resting blood pressure. Thermal pain threshold and tolerance were determined, and a cross-modality thermal magnitude matching procedure was conducted, after which ischemic pain threshold and tolerance were determined using the submaximal effort tourniquet procedure. ⋯ These findings are consistent with previous research indicating an inverse relationship between blood pressure and pain sensitivity. Additionally, the findings also suggest that blood pressure may partially moderate gender differences in pain sensitivity. Potential mechanisms and clinical implications of the current findings are discussed.
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Although clinical observations suggest that alexithymic individuals have a deficit in their ability to recognize emotional stimuli and that this deficit is not simply due to a problem in verbal labeling, these two hypotheses have not been empirically confirmed. Three hundred eighty participants in a community survey without current or past histories of psychiatric disorder completed two independent measures of alexithymia [the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20)] and the Perception of Affect Task (PAT), a 140-item measure of the ability to match emotion stimuli. The PAT includes four subtasks that require the subject to match verbal or nonverbal emotion stimuli with verbal or nonverbal emotion responses. ⋯ Fifty-one subjects met TAS-20 criteria for alexithymia. Alexithymic individuals scored lower than other subjects on purely nonverbal matching, purely verbal matching, and mixed verbal-nonverbal matching (all p < .001). These results suggest that alexithymia is associated with impaired verbal and nonverbal recognition of emotion stimuli and that the hallmark of alexithymia, a difficulty in putting emotion into words, may be a marker of a more general impairment in the capacity for emotion information processing.
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Psychosomatic medicine · Sep 1995
Comparative StudyPersonality factors in women with premenstrual syndrome.
The recently developed Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ) was used to examine personality correlates in women diagnosed with premenstrual syndrome (PMS). The hypotheses were that the TPQ scores, specifically harm avoidance (HA), would be higher in PMS subjects than in the general population but lower than in depressed populations because major mood disorder is an exclusion from the PMS diagnosis; harm avoidance would have the strongest association with PMS, but other TPQ factors might characterize nondysphoric subgroups in the PMS population. The sample included 157 women who sought medical treatment and met clearly defined criteria for PMS. ⋯ PMS was associated with only modest nonnormative personality correlates, as assessed by the TPQ. Elevations of the HA and NS dimensions were associated with a tendency for the PMS to present with specific symptom patterns: depressive symptoms for the HA factor and food cravings and mood swings for the NS factor. Further research employing other assessment methods is needed to confirm these findings.