Recreating cardiovascular responses with rumination: The effects of a delay between harassment and its recall
Section snippets
Overview
On the first visit to the laboratory, all participants completed a mental arithmetic task with harassment while their blood pressure and heart rate were monitored. On the second visit to the laboratory, participants were asked to recall as vividly as possible the arithmetic task they had experienced on the previous visit. Half of the subjects (those in the Immediate condition) returned to the laboratory for the recall task 30 min after the first session. The other half (Delayed condition)
Visit 1: mental arithmetic stressor
The average systolic blood pressure during baseline was 106.2 mm Hg, the diastolic blood pressure was 65.9 mm Hg and the average heart rate was 77.5 bpm. There were no significant differences in baseline levels of blood pressure or heart rate between the groups (all t(20)'s < .36; p's > .73).
The mental arithmetic stressor task produced sizeable blood pressure and heart rate responses. The increases from baseline for the groups are shown in Fig. 1. The mean increase for the Immediate group was
Discussion
The results shed light on two aspects of the relation between a harassment stressor and the later physiological response to the recall of that stressor. First, the data suggest that recall of even a relatively minor stressor such as the one we employed in this study is associated with increased blood pressure at recall both 30 min later and 1 week later. Second, our results suggest that the size of this blood pressure response does not diminish after a week's delay. Participants who were asked
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2021, International Journal of PsychophysiologyCitation Excerpt :Although it was not tested in the current study, one possibility is loneliness predisposing people to engage in rumination. Past work has suggested that those who experience more loneliness tend to ruminate more (Zawadzki et al., 2013), and that rumination can explain delayed BP recovery after experiencing stress (Gerin et al., 2006; Glynn et al., 2007; Radstaak et al., 2011). Future work would benefit from testing if rumination – and other cognitive and emotional processes – were induced by the loneliness manipulation, and then how long their effects persist.
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2020, Behaviour Research and TherapyCitation Excerpt :This convergence of experimental and prospective results suggests that rumination may causally reduce parasympathetic flexibility, which in turn predicts depression. Individuals with elevated trait rumination take longer to return to cardiovascular baseline following a stressor (Gerin, Davidson, Christenfeld, Goyal, & Schwartz, 2006; Glynn, Christenfeld, & Gerin, 2007; Johnson, Key, Routledge, Gerin, & Campbell, 2014; Radstaak, Geurts, Brosschot, Cillessen, & Kompier, 2011), including in adolescents (Aldao, McLaughlin, Hatzenbuehler, & Sheridan, 2014). A recent meta-analysis of 43 experimental studies found statistically significant and large reactivity effect sizes of inducing both anger and sadness rumination on increasing cardiovascular reactivity, as indexed by heart rate, diastolic blood pressure, and systolic blood pressure, with standardized mean effect sizes (d) ranging from 0.75 to 1.39 (Busch et al., 2017).
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