The proposed study seeks to identify the communicative processes that produce cardiovascular responses during speech. Numerous studies have demonstrated that heart rate and blood pressure increase when people begin speaking. Because of the magnitude of some people's reactivity and the frequency of the occurrence of cardiovascular changes due to speaking, speech production is a potentially important source of reactivity. Evidence from a variety of sources suggests that cardiovascular reactivity to speech has potential health implications. Several scholars implicate blood pressure reactivity in cardiovascular disease. One angiographic study provided direct evidence of the potential cumulative effects of speech on coronary occlusion. In order to explain why heart rate and blood pressure become elevated during speech, the proposed study examines two facets of the production of speech (cognitive demand and self-involvement of the communication task) and two individual characteristics (gender and race). Additionally, this proposal seeks to assess the importance of these factors in explaining heart rate reactivity in naturalistic settings. Two studies are proposed. The first is a laboratory experiment with 140 subjects. Cognitive demand and self-involvement will be manipulated experimentally and the effects of these variables on heart rate and blood pressure of male, female, Caucasian, and African-American subjects will be examined. The second investigation is an ambulatory study using Logoport, a device that measures heart rate and speech behavior simultaneously. The study will compare heart rate reactivity to low, moderate, and high cognitive demand speech by male, female, Caucasian, and African- American subjects. Additionally, the study will compare the effects of disclosive speech and non-disclosive speech on heart rate.
| Tardy, C H; Allen, M T (1998) Moderators of cardiovascular reactivity to speech: discourse production and group variations in blood pressure and pulse rate. Int J Psychophysiol 29:247-54 |
