K. Davidson is a licensed clinical psychologist with previous training in empirically supported/validated psychological therapies. She has previous experience in conducting psychological interventions, but she has limited training and research experience with medical patient populations. Her long-term goal is to propose, test, and empirically validate psychological therapy protocols with hypertensive patients. This award will aid by providing the time and resources for K. Davidson to acquire knowledge and expertise in the following eight modules: 1) hypertension pathophysiology; 2) hypertensionpharmacology; 3) Medical Ethics; 4) hypertension epidemiology and risk factor analyses; 5) ambulatory and continuous blood pressure monitoring technology; 6) randomized controlled trial statistical and design issues; and, 7) research dissemination and grant submission for randomized controlled psychological interventions with hypertension patients. Mount Sinai School of Medicine is an ideal environment for this training experience as it has commissioned a new Integrative & Behavioral Cardiology program to provide empirically based psychological and complimentary interventions to its patients, and already has an existing Hypertension section. Dr. Pickering is an ideal mentor because of his world-renowned hypertension expertise. The major aim of the current project is to test the feasibility of comparing an anger management group plus usual medical care to two control conditions-usual medical care only and another group therapy (time management) plus usual medical care. Thus, aims are to obtain patient retention and effectiveness estimates of eligible volunteering hypertension patients with anger problems, who complete the intervention prototocol. The design will be a randomized, blood pressure, medication, and anger expression- matched, two control arm design, with 20 medicated, uncontrolled hypertension patients in each condition. Objectives include collecting estimates to propose a large-scale clinical trial, and offering a standardized, evidence-based treatment to medicated uncontrolled hypertension patients who additionally have anger expression difficulties so that better blood pressure control can be obtained.
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