Parental hypertension, affect, and cardiovascular response to cognitive challenge.

This investigation examined the cardiovascular and affective reactions of offspring of hypertensive and normotensive parents on exposure of subjects to a frustrating cognitive task. Subjects were 44 normotensive, male undergraduate volunteers, 22 with and 22 without a parental history of hypertension. Heart rate (HR) and systolic and diastolic blood pressure (SBP, DBP) measurements were recorded under resting (baseline) conditions and during subjects' performance of a 3-min mental arithmetic task. Subjects were also administered state forms of the State-Trait Anxiety and Anger Inventories following baseline measurements and immediately after the experimental task. Results indicated that relative to sons of normotensive parents, offspring of hypertensives showed significantly greater HR and DBP elevations during mental arithmetic. However, neither task performance nor task-related changes on the state measures of anxiety and anger varied reliably with differences in parental status. When subjects were divided into groups of high- and low-affect (i.e., anxiety, anger) responders, the HR reactions of persons having hypertensive and normotensive parents were found to differ significantly only among subjects who reported experiencing the most appreciable anxiety--and to a lesser extent, anger--when performing the mental arithmetic task. This finding suggests that persons at familial risk for hypertension possess a heightened cardiovascular response "potential" which is expressed, in part, in relation to concomitant affective experiences of the individual.