To test these hypotheses, Tugade and Fredrickson (2004) collected continuous measures of cardiovascular responding from all participants (N = 57) at a sampling rate of 1000 Hz. Six indices of cardiovascular responding were collected, including (1) heart rate (HR), (2) finger pulse amplitude (FPA), (3) pulse transmission times to the finger (PTF), (4) pulse transmission time to the ear (PTE), (5) diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and (6) systolic blood pressure (SBP). After a resting baseline, anxiety was experimentally induced by telling participants that they would have 60 sec to mentally prepare a speech on a self-relevant topic. Following the 60-sec, speech-preparation task, there was a 3-min recovery period. Participants also completed self-reports of subjective emotional experience, ambient positive and negative mood (PANAS; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1989), and trait resilience (Block & Kremen, 1996).
Findings indicated that, across all participants, the speech preparation task produced subjective experiences of anxiety and increases in cardiovascular reactivity from baseline (see Table 1 ). These changes reflect task-induced, cardiovascular arousal, which includes heart rate acceleration, increased blood pressure, and peripheral vasoconstriction.
Table 1
Note. Reproduced with permission from the APA. HR = heart rate in beats per min; FPA = finger pulse amplitude in mv; PTF = pulse transmission time to the finger and PTE = pulse transmission time to the ear, each in msec; DBP = diastolic blood pressure and SBP = systolic blood pressure, each in mmHg. Continue reading
