Is authoritarianism the main element of the coronary-prone personality?

Clients at the Sydney Coronary Heart Disease Prevention Programme were screened for actual CHD and sufferers were compared with non-suffers on four personality scales to measure, respectively, A-B, dominance, achievement motivation and 'freneticism'. There were 112 sufferers and 201 controls. Sufferers were found to have significantly higher scores on dominance-the Ray (1976) Directiveness scale-but also to have significantly lower scores on the A-B measure. This latter reversal of the usual relationship was an artifact of the fact that older people are both more CHD prone and get lower A-B scores. When age was controlled for there was no relationship between A-B type and CHD. This left the authoritarian style of dominance measured by the Directiveness scale as the sole predictor of CHD. This was held to be a belated vindication of claims made in the pioneering work of Dunbar (1943).