Hostility, social support and cardiac reactivity in a stress situation

This paper attempts to clarify the inconsistencies in the researches that pretend to establish how social support modulates the relationship between the construct anger-hostility and the psychophysiological mechanism. There are two basic ideas: First, the multidimensionality of the construct anger-hostility, which implies the existance of several psychosocial variables, so toxic as innocuous according to the psychophysiological mechanism that links some psychosocial variables and coronary health; second, the multidimensionality of social support, which includes variables of different nature. So, we considered several measures of the construct anger-hostility, using the BDHI inventory and Ho inventory. According to social support we have considered the perceived social support, using the SSQ. Different psychophysiological measures (activation, reactivity and recovery of heart rate) were recorded in a sample of 142 women in a register session where different stressful events were presented. The results showed that the social support acts in a differential way on the relationship between the construct anger-hostility and psychophysiological parameters, these changed according to the measure of the construct anger-hostility.