Dispositional hostility and gender differentially relate to cognitive appraisal, engagement, and cardiovascular reactivity across cognitive and emotional laboratory tasks

We investigated the relations of hostility and gender to cardiovascular reactivity and recovery to a cognitive and an emotional laboratory task without harassment. Physiological, affect, appraisal, and task engagement data were collected during baseline, mental arithmetic, stress-recall, and recovery for 93 young adults (58% women; 57% White). For men, hostility was inversely related to heart rate and diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and positively associated with root-mean-squared successive difference (RMSSD) during mental arithmetic. Hostility was inversely related to systolic blood pressure (SBP), DBP, and mean arterial pressure (MAP) during stress-recall, and RMSSD after stress-recall for men. For women, hostility was associated with greater SBP responses during stress-recall, and greater recovery of SBP, DBP and MAP. Hostility was related to lesser engagement for men during mental arithmetic, and greater engagement and threat for women during stress-recall. Hostile men may be more likely than hostile women to disengage during emotionally-relevant tasks, and show attenuated cardiovascular reactivity and recovery to both cognitive and emotional tasks in the absence of harassment.