Heart-rate and blood-pressure responses to speech alone compared with cognitive challenges in the Stroop task.
Heart-rate and blood-pressure responses are assumed to reflect the "stressfulness" of cognitive tasks. Cardiovascular responses to speech are often assumed to be negligible. To test these assumptions, 34 middle-aged men (mean age 45.0 +/- 6.1) performed three versions of the Stroop color-conflict task, passive responding, push-button, and verbal. Although difficulty of passive responding was rated 11.8 (fairly light), push-button 16.1 (between hard and very hard), and verbal Stroop 14.5 (hard), all were significantly different. Analysis of variance showed during tasks heart-rate responses and systolic blood pressure did not differ. Recovery average heart-rate and over-all heart-rate patterns were not different for the difficult tasks but were significantly different from the easy task. Diastolic blood-pressure changes during tasks were more similar for verbal tasks despite the difference in difficulty. Stressor heart-rate and systolic blood-pressure responses did not reflect the difficulty of this stressful task. Verbalization of responses contributed significantly to cardiovascular reactivity.
Stein
P K
PK
Washington University Medical School, St. Louis, Missouri.
Boutcher
S H
SH
D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D001143:Arousal; D001288:Attention; D001794:Blood Pressure; D003118:Color Perception; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004562:Electrocardiography; D006339:Heart Rate; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011340:Problem Solving; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior