Repeated elicitation of the blood pressure response

Abstract

Task-elicited blood pressure (BPI, heart rate (HRI, and respiration rate (RRI responses were reliably and persistently elicited during the five 5-min trials for two consecutive daily sessions. BP response magnitude declined slightly over trials for both sessions. This diminution in magnitude was due, however, to a gradual rise in baseline levels. In general, examination of trial-by-trial data and of the between-session correlations for baseline and response magnitude values suggests that task-elicited BP and HR responses, and, to a lesser extent, RR responses, constitute a highly stable system that changes slowly,if at all, with practice. 321It is well known that the performance of a variety of psychomotor and cognitive tasks is associated with elevations in blood pressure (BP). These tasks have ranged from performing a reaction-time task to filling out a questionnaire. Despite the ubiquity of such demonstrations, relatively little is known about the dynamics of task-elicited BP responding. Instead, studies involving the elicitation of BP responses have typically used the elicited response as a tool for the study of other variables, such as response patterning (Engel & Bickford, 1961) and vulnerability to cardiovascular disease (Krantz, Schaeffer, Davia, Dembroski, MacDougall, & Shaffer, 1981), and the study of sophisticated theories of cardiovascularsomatic integration (Obrist, 1976). Because of such research emphases, only a few studies have directly addressed the short-term and long-term persistence of such responses. For example, in an early study, Malmo, Shagass, and Heslam (1951) found that taskelicited increases in systolic BP declined sharply in magnitude after several trials . One problem with this finding is that a different task was used on each trial and the tasks were presented in a fixed sequence. This procedure inextricably confounds the effects of type of task with order, thus allowing the alternative explanation that the tasks presented late in the series were less "potent" than the tasks presented early in the series. More recently, Ray and Emurian (1982) found that task-elicited BP elevations showed no diminution in magnitude during a 6O-min experimental session in which the task was continuously present. This could be demonstrated with both naive subjects and highly practiced subjects . In another series of experiments, Manuck and Garland (1980) and Manuck and Schaefer (1978) found that BP responses elicited by an anagram task showed a high test-retest reliability, even over an interval of 13 months. An examination of the figures presented in the Manuck and Garland and Manuck and Schaefer studies suggests that the magnitude of the elicited BP response diminished slightly over sessions. This trend, however, was riot discussed by the authors.The purposes of the present study were to investigate the effect of repeated elicitation of the BP response, both within sessions and between sessions, and to examine, in a preliminary way, the reliability of BP responding across sessions and the intercor...