Red faces, high irritability and a tendency to choleric outbursts: Men in particular with high blood pressure have long been said to get angry particularly quickly and that this tendency may even be responsible for their high blood pressure. A German-Swiss research team has now investigated whether there is any truth to this assumption. Their result: Men with high blood pressure actually tend to interpret other people’s facial expressions as anger. Those who had more tantrums themselves and were more easily infected by the anger of others also showed a worsening of their high blood pressure a few years later.
High blood pressure is considered one of the main risk factors for cardiovascular disease and death from heart attack and stroke. It is therefore important to prevent high blood pressure or at least to treat it at an early stage. The problem, however, is that in the vast majority of cases, no clear organic cause can be found. Experts then speak of essential hypertension. However, there has long been the assumption that certain psychological factors can increase a tendency to high blood pressure. For example, because anger and resentment naturally raise blood pressure, there is a suspicion that more choleric personalities may suffer from high blood pressure more often. However, the data on this have so far been ambiguous and information on the psychosocial component has been lacking.
Can anger increase high blood pressure?
That’s why Alisa Auer from the University of Konstanz and her colleagues have now examined the anger reaction of men with and without high blood pressure in more detail. For their study, they first showed their 145 subjects portraits of people with facial expressions characterized by different emotions. The computer-processed faces each showed a mimic mixture of two emotional expressions, such as fear and anger, sadness and anger, or joy and anger. The two emotions were each weighted differently. The participants were now asked to indicate which emotions they saw on the faces. The evaluation of this experiment revealed: “The hypertensive people recognized anger more often than any other emotion,” reports Auer. “They overestimated the anger in the faces shown compared to our comparison group with normal blood pressure.”
At the same time, the research team examined the propensity of their subjects to become angry themselves using a standardized psychological test. At first, she couldn’t find anything abnormal: On average, the men with high blood pressure reacted with anger just as often or less often than the test subjects with normal blood pressure values. However, after Auer and her colleagues had tracked the health of the participants and, in particular, their blood pressure for several years, an anomaly became apparent: the blood pressure of those who got angry more quickly rose more significantly over time than that of the men who reacted more sensitively to the supposed anger of others, but did not get angry themselves, as the team reports.
Approach to better prevention and therapy
The scientists conclude that anger and anger can indeed play a role in the long-term development of blood pressure. “Our results suggest that men with essential hypertension have a distorted perception of anger – and that this overestimation of anger in others, coupled with a tendency to become angry, promotes the long-term increase in blood pressure,” Auer and her colleagues state. They hope that these findings can also help with the prevention and treatment of those affected in the future. So far, high blood pressure medication can only mitigate the consequences of hypertension, but not have a causal effect.
“The next step would then be that people with essential hypertension can be given more targeted support,” says Auer. This could happen, for example, through targeted psychotherapies that help those affected to soothe their own choleric streak. Training to help these men correct their inflated perceptions of anger in others may also help. But what about the women? So far, the research team has only focused on men because they are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure. However, they hope to be able to investigate the anger reactions of women with and without hypertension in follow-up studies.
Source: Alisa Auer (University of Konstanz) et al., Annals of Behavioral Medicine; doi: 10.1093/abm/kaab108