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Cardiovascular Reactivity to Psychological Stress in Healthy Children
Author(s) -
Murphy Joseph K.,
Alpert Bruce S.,
Willey Elaine S.,
Somes Grant W.
Publication year - 1988
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-8986.1988.tb00977.x
Subject(s) - reactivity (psychology) , psychology , heart rate , normative , percentile , blood pressure , hemodynamics , developmental psychology , race (biology) , video game , stress (linguistics) , clinical psychology , cardiology , medicine , philosophy , statistics , botany , alternative medicine , mathematics , multimedia , linguistics , epistemology , pathology , computer science , biology
Cardiovascular reactivity to stress has been implicated as a marker and/or mechanism in the development of cardiovascular disease. No normative data exist to classify children's reactivity to psychological stress. This investigation presents normative percentile data on the hemodynamic responses (heart rate and blood pressure) of 310 healthy, black or white, children between the ages of 6 and 18 years to the stress of a television video game. A series of three video games, played under three increasing levels of stress, elicited progressively higher values of blood pressure and heart rate. Both the child's race and gender, as well as the experimenter's race, significantly affected reactivity. Children demonstrated a wide range of interchild reactivity, thus allowing separation of individuals into high and low risk percentile groups.