Threat-related motivational disengagement: Integrating blunted cardiovascular reactivity to stress into the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat.

The biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat specifies a challenge-threat continuum where favorable demand-resource evaluations, efficient cardiovascular responses, and superior performance characterize challenge; and maladaptive outcomes like clinical depression characterize threat states. The model also specifies task engagement, operationalized as heart rate and ventricular contractility increases, as a prerequisite for challenge and threat states. The blunted cardiovascular reactivity to stress literature describes reductions of these increases and associates them with problems like clinical depression. To determine whether blunted cardiovascular reactivity to stress has implications for challenge and threat theory. We review and synthesize the literatures on blunted cardiovascular reactivity to stress and the biopsychosocial model. Blunted cardiovascular reactivity appears not to reflect a physiological inability to respond to stress. Rather, it reflects a contextually dependent motivational dysregulation and reduced reactivity to stress consistent with deficient task engagement in the biopsychosocial model. We argue that blunted cardiovascular reactivity represents deficient task engagement, and more generally, motivational disengagement due to threat states. Our biopsychosocial model-based approach conceptualizes this motivational disengagement as a tendency to avoid motivated performance situations. This tendency may represent a defense mechanism against subsequent threat and might explain associations with disorders like clinical depression.