Even brief periods of anger caused by triggering memories can negatively impact our blood vessels’ ability to relax. That’s the finding of a new study that could have implications on how we look at heart attack and stroke risk.
While there have been observational studies in the past linking negative emotions like anger to an increased risk of heart attacks, scientists working with the American Heart Association wanted to see if they could more precisely pin down how an experience of anger actually affects our blood vessels and the cells lining them.
So they recruited 280 healthy adults with an average of 26 years to participate in a study in which they were asked to sit quietly and relax for 30 minutes before moving to the next step. Then, researchers took their blood pressure, heart rate, measured their dilation of their blood vessels using finger probes, and took blood samples. Next, the participants were assigned an emotional task based on their place in one of four randomly assigned groups.
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One group was asked to recall a memory that made them angry, the second group was asked to recall a memory of anxiety; the third group read a batch of depressing sentences to evoke sadness; and the fourth group simply counted from zero to 100 over and over again to create an emotionally neutral state. All individuals participated in their assigned task for eight minutes.
After the tasks were completed, the same measurements from the beginning of the study were taken again at three minutes, 40 minutes, 70 minutes and 100 minutes.
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