No respite during sleep: heart-rate hyperreactivity to rapid eye movement sleep in angry men classified as Type A.

9 men scoring as Type A and Angry and 9 men scoring as Type B and Nonangry on the Jenkins Activity Survey and Spielberger's Trait Anger Expression completed a 1-min. mental arithmetic task and slept through 1 period of rapid eye movement. The Angry Type A scorers showed greater heart-rate increases from baseline to that during mental arithmetic and from nonrapid eye movements to periods of REM than the Nonangry Type B scorers. While the former showed equivalent reactivity to stressors while awake and asleep, the latter group showed less heart-rate reactivity during the period of REM than during mental arithmetic. Neither group yielded clear descriptions of their dreams, and no differences between groups were noted for ratings on aggressivity in dreams. It appears that Angry Type A scorers show cardiovascular hyperreactivity even when asleep in the lab.