Success importance and urge magnitude as determinants of cardiovascular response to a behavioral restraint challenge

• Participants were presented a mildly- or strongly evocative violent film clip with instructions to refrain from showing any facial response.
• Success was made more or less important through coordinated manipulations of outcome expectancy, ego-involvement and social evaluation.
• Systolic blood pressure responses were proportional to clip evocativeness when importance was high, but not when importance was low.

Decades of research have investigated a conceptual analysis concerned with determinants and cardiovascular correlates of effort in people confronted with performance challenges, that is, opportunities to alter some course of events by acting. One suggestion is that effort and associated cardiovascular responses should be determined jointly by the difficulty of meeting a challenge and the importance of doing so. The present experiment tested this in a context involving behavioral restraint, that is, effortful resistance against a behavioral impulse or urge. Participants were presented a mildly evocative violent film clip (restraint difficulty low) or a strongly evocative violent film clip (restraint difficulty high) with instructions to refrain from showing any facial response. Success was made more or less important through coordinated manipulations of outcome expectancy, ego-involvement and social evaluation. As expected, SBP responses assessed during the work period were proportional to clip evocativeness – i.e., the difficulty of the restraint challenge – when importance was high, but low regardless of clip evocativeness when importance was low. Findings conceptually replicate previous cardiovascular results and support extension of the guiding analysis to the behavioral restraint realm.