Interactive effects of avoidant coping and parental hypertension on rate pressure product reactivity in women

Previous research suggests that personality, situational context variables, and genes might interact to potentiate cardiovascular stress responses.

Our purpose is to examine interactive effects of dispositional avoidant coping and parental hypertension on cardiovascular reactivity to three different laboratory stressors.

Participants were 63 healthy female students. Stressors were an evaluated videotaped speech, the cold pressor, and viewing of the speech video. Heart rate and blood pressure were continuously recorded during baselines and tasks.

After controlling for age, body mass index, smoking status, reported exercise, alcohol consumption, oral contraceptive use, parental hypertension, and avoidant coping, the interaction term of parental hypertension and avoidant coping was the best predictor of rate pressure product (RPP) reactivity to the speech task and to the video-viewing task. In contrast, reactivity to the cold pressor was not significantly predicted by this interaction term. Furthermore, there were no significant main effects of parental hypertension and avoidant coping on RPP reactivity in any of the tasks. There were no significant interactive effects for diastolic blood pressure.

Consistent with an interactive model of cardiovascular reactivity, parental hypertension plus avoidant coping led to enhanced RPP reactivity. This effect, however, was only evident during self-threatening stressors. The results suggest that the coincidence of genetic and personality factors might enhance risk for cardiovascular diseases.