ROLE OF EMOTION IN TYPE A BEHAVIOR PATTERN

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Hostility and anger have been implicated as important components of the Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern (TABP). However, there is little agreement as to what constitutes hostility and what component is most closely linked with TABP and coronary heart disease (CHD). No single study has evaluated all anger-relevant variables in a systematic, quantitative way under authentic arousal conditions. Morover, few investigators have explored other emotional correlates of TABP in order to discern whether TABP individuals reveal anomalous emotion profiles specific to anger, or a more general pattern involving other emotions. The present study is designed to characterize the pattern of Type A emotionality in a detailed fashion. The study assesses differences between Type A and Type B individuals in 1) their predispositions to become angry, 2) the intensity of provoked angry feelings, and 3) various aspects of behavioral expression or inhibition of anger. It also permits the assessment of differences in other discrete emotions as well. Data are based on personality measures, an emotion induction procedure which is video-taped for later microanalytic coding of facial expressions and voice analysis, and phenomenological ratings of emotional intensity. In brief than, this project is designed to yield important information concerning the emotional profiles of individuals known to be at risk for heart disease. The use of an efficacious, laboratory-based emotion induction procedure involving the induction of several types of negative emotion, in combination with a fine-grained, compotent analysis of the various channels of emotion expression, permits a level of analysis of the emotionality of Type A and Type B individuals that has never before been undertaken.