The high morbidity and mortality associated with cardiovascular (CV) disease have led to a profusion of research into its etiology. With only 50% of the variance in risk associated with traditional risk factors, research has begun to focus more on psychological and behavioral risk factors to improve treatment and prevention options for CV disease. CV reactivity and recovery following an emotional stressor such as anger has been proposed as possible explanations for the relationship between negative emotional stressors and CV health through prolonged activation of the autonomic stress response. One proposed factor that may contribute to prolonged autonomic activation following anger includes anger rumination, which is the tendency to have unintentional and recurrent thoughts about anger experiences after the anger experience has ended. While previous research has shown that engaging in anger rumination following anger is associated with longer recovery time and continued experiences of anger (e.g., Gerin et al., 2006), no research has focused on CV responses following anger in which no one was to blame, such as being angry with one’s self. The present studied examined the role of state and trait anger rumination and state and trait negative affect on CV recovery time after having 75 healthy undergraduate students (ages 18-44) write about two anger experiences in a repeated-measures design: one in which they had been angry with someone else (other-anger) and another in which they had been angry with themselves (self-anger). Path analysis results revealed that trait anger rumination, but not state anger rumination, was a significant direct predictor of longer CV recovery time following the other-anger writing task, but the same pattern was not observed following the self-anger
writing task. Furthermore, trait negative affect was significantly but negatively associated with CV recovery time for both self-anger and other-anger, indicating that higher trait negative affect was associated with faster CV recovery time. The findings from the present study suggest that although both writing tasks were associated with significant changes in CV responses and self-reported state negative affect, the influence of trait anger rumination on CV responses may only operate when the anger was caused by someone else. While the proposed model was not supported in the present study, findings do suggest self-anger is common and is associated with similar CV responses to those seen in other-anger. Thus, further research is warranted to examine potential psychological factors that may underlie self-anger and its concomitant CV responses
