Cardiovascular Responses and their Psychological Correlates

Abstract

Heart rate and blood pressure responses in human subjects, when they occur, coincide with the presentation of TAT cards and appear to be related to the interaction of the subject and experimenter and to the subject's communicating his story, but not to its content. Merely looking at the card without having to tell a story coincides with negligible physiological responses. During the period when a subject looks at a card, knowing he will have to tell the story, physiological responses occur as a prerequisite of further increases in heart rate and blood pressure while talking. Failure to interact with the experimenter was always associated with physiological hyporeactivity. Subjects with essential hypertension were remarkably unreactive as a group and this lack of physiological responsiveness could be ascribed to the nature of their relationship to the experimenter. Female subjects showed no change in the force of their heartbeat (B.C.G.) at any time.