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.By contrast the Type B's are more laid-back.Morerecent research has shown that it is the hostility that may be themost important risk factor.Hostile people should be more likely toshow more anger, and that is what we sought to check in this study.We examined the facial expressions of midlevel executives at alarge business, who had already been classified by experts as either Aor B.They all underwent a mildly challenging interview, in whichthe interviewer slightly frustrated the interviewees.Technicians usedthe technique my colleague Wally Friesen and I had developed formeasuring facial movement—the Facial Action Coding System(FACS).As I explained in chapter 1, this technique doesn't measureemotion directly; instead, it objectively scores all facial muscularmovements.The technicians who did the FACS scoring did notknow who was an A and who was a B.They used slowed andrepeated viewing of the videotape to identify the facial muscularmovements.Analyzing the results, we found that a particular expres-sion—a partial anger expression that we called a glare (shown onpage 127), in which just the brows are lowered and the upper eyelidsare raised—was shown more often by the A's than the B's.It was only a glare, not a full anger expression, probably because theA's were trying to diminish any sign of their anger.These businessexecutives were sophisticated; they knew they should try not to appearangry.Another possibility is that they were only annoyed, and becausetheir anger was not intense it did not register across the entire face.A major limitation of this study—not knowing what was hap-pening to their hearts when these people glared—was remedied inour next study.My former student Erika Rosenberg and I examinedpatients who had been diagnosed as already having serious coronaryartery disease.They were vulnerable to what are called ischemicGLAREepisodes, during which the heart does not get enough oxygen for aperiod of time.When this happens most people experience pain,angina, which tells them to stop whatever they are doing becausethey are at risk of having a heart attack if they don't.The patientswe were studying had silent ischemia, no pain, no warning whentheir heart was not getting enough oxygen.In this collaborative study21 with James Blumenthal's researchgroup at Duke University, the patients were again videotaped in amildly challenging interview.This time a continuous measure ofischemia was obtained from an imaging device pressed against theirchest that produced a picture of their heart as they talked.We mea-sured their facial expressions during a two-minute period when theyanswered questions about how they dealt with anger in their lives.Those who became ischemic showed a full or partial anger expres-sion on their face much more often than the patients who did notbecome ischemic.Showing anger in their face when they talkedabout past frustrations suggests that they were not just talking aboutanger; they were reliving their anger.And anger, we know fromother research, accelerates heart rate and increases blood pressure.Itis like running up a flight of stairs; you shouldn't do it if you havecoronary artery disease, and not everyone did.Those who didn'tbecome angry were much less likely to become ischemic.Before explaining why we think we obtained these findings, letme make clear that this study did not show that anger caused heartdisease.Other research22 has found that either the personality traitof hostility, or the emotion of anger (and it is not certain which itmight be), is one of the risk factors for producing heart disease, butthat is not what we did.Instead we found that in people who alreadyhave heart disease, getting angry increased their risk of becomingischemic, which puts them at increased risk for having a heart attack.Now let us consider why these people became angry when theytalked about being angry in the past, and why that put them at risk.All of us talk about emotions we are not feeling at the moment.We tell someone about a sad event, a time when we got angry, whatmade us afraid, and so forth.Sometimes in the course of describinga past emotional experience we begin to experience the emotion allover again.That is what I believe happened to the people whobecame ischemic.They could not talk about angry experiences with-out becoming angry again, without reliving their anger.Unfortu-nately, for people with coronary artery disease, that is dangerous.Why did this happen to some people and not others? Why do somepeople reexperience past angry experiences while others don't? Pre-sumably, anger is easily provoked, ready to surface with any oppor-tunity, in those who have a hostile personality.It is both a mark anda manifestation of being a hostile personality that rememberedangry events would reinstitute the feelings that were felt.Leaving aside hostile people, any of us may find we are reliving apast emotional experience that we started out thinking we wouldjust describe [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]