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Repressive coping style and autonomic reactions to two experimental stressors in healthy men and women
Author(s) -
JØRGENSEN MICHAEL MARTINI,
ZACHARIAE ROBERT
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.2006.00501.x
Subject(s) - psychology , coping (psychology) , stressor , autonomic nervous system , heart rate variability , reactivity (psychology) , anxiety , developmental psychology , clinical psychology , heart rate , blood pressure , psychiatry , medicine , alternative medicine , pathology
Autonomic and affective responses to two different stress tasks were measured in 45 males and 74 females, categorized as repressive, true low‐anxious, true high‐anxious, and defensive high‐anxious. Electrodermal activity (EDA) was used as a measure of sympathetic activity and the high frequency (HF) spectral component of heart rate variability as a measure of parasympathetic activity. Contrary to our predictions, reactivity of repressors did not differ from the reactivity of true low‐anxious participants. The results draw attention to previous inconsistent findings within the literature on repressive coping style and autonomic nervous system dysregulation. It is suggested that future research could benefit from the use of more consistent operationalizations of the repressive coping construct and from comparing alternative measures of repressive coping within the same study.