The impatience of youth: phasic cardiovascular response in type A and type B elementary school-aged boys

Impatience, one major Type A characteristic, alters the performance of tasks requiring anticipation and accurate responding. Beat-by-beat changes in heart rate are also known to occur during anticipatory attention. In college- and middle-aged adult samples, impatience is related to these beat-by-beat heart rate changes during anticipatory attention. The objective of the current study was to see if this relationship was also present in children classified by the impatience-aggression scale of the Matthews Youth Test for Health, a measure of children's Type A behaviors. In study 1, 34 fifth-grade boys performed a modified Pong task. In study 2, 30 fourth-grade boys performed a variable interval simple reaction time task. In both studies, patient and impatient boys showed different beat-by-beat heart rate responses. The results were generally, but not wholly, consistent with the view that impatience leads to a late developing and quickly recovering but robust deceleration at the time of an anticipated event. Consistencies as well as inconsistencies of our findings with the results from college- and middle-aged samples are discussed.