Intertask consistency of hemodynamic responses to laboratory stressors in a biracial sample of men and women

Abstract

Cardiovascular responses were examined in a community sample of 128 subjects, comprised of 58 African American and 70 Caucasian American men and women. Subjects completed a battery of laboratory stressors including mental arithmetic,reaction time, a speech task, and the cold pressor test. In addition to systolic and diastolic blood pressures, the underlying hemodynamic parameters of cardiac output and total peripheral resistance were assessed. In order to explore intertask consistency of response in both ethnic groups and both gender groups, correlational analyses were conducted separately for each group. For the psychological tasks, unanimously significant coefficients were observed. Intertask consistency between psychological tasks and the cold pressor was also considerable, but was somewhat less impressive (particularly for blood pressure) than that observed among the psychological tasks themselves. With regard to hemodynamic responses, cardiac output and total peripheral resistance demonstrated intertask consistency equal to, if not greater than, that shown by systolic and diastolic blood pressure, this consistency being evident for each ethnic and each gender group.