The type A coronary-prone behavior pattern and reactions to uncontrollable stress: an analysis of performance strategies, affect, and attributions during failure.

The present study examined the ongoing experience of Type A and Type B undergraduates during prolonged exposure to unsolvable discrimination problems in which the cue signaling failure was highly or moderately salient to subjects. Subjects were asked to think out loud while solving the problems that were presented in a manner to permit monitoring of their problem-solving strategies. Results revealed that the problem-solving strategies of high-salience A's deteriorated across failure trials. At the same time, they commented on their lack of ability and, to some extent, on the task's difficulty as accounting for their failure. They expressed annoyance and anger at themselves and at their circumstances. On the other hand, B's did not use ineffectual strategies; they continued to perform appropriately during failure. However, they did comment on task difficulty (during the experiment) as well as on chance and the experimenter (at the conclusion of the experiment) as playing critical roles in their failure to do well. The results suggest that deficits in performance of A's and of B's in previous investigations are the outcomes of different processes: A's may be helpless, whereas B's may be pseudohelpless. The findings support Pattern A as a specific coping style aimed at maintaining and asserting control over stressful aspects of the environment. Implications for the reformulated models of learned helplessness are discussed.

Attention, unpredictability, and reports of physical symptoms: eliminating the benefits of predictability.

Sometimes unpredictable aversive events have more adverse consequences than predictable aversive events and sometimes not. Three experiments were conducted to test an attentional explanation of the inconsistent effects of unpredictability. This explanation suggests that unpredictable events exert a deleterious influence because more attention is typically directed to them. If there were no difference in the amount of attention directed to unpredictable and predictable events, however, there should be no difference in their effects. The validity of these notions was assessed by applying them to one previously established finding from the unpredictability literature--the finding that exposure to unpredictable noise leads to reports of more severe physical symptoms than does exposure to predictable noise. In Experiment 1, subjects performed a reaction time task while they listened to loud bursts of either predictable or unpredictable noise. As expected, reaction times were slower when the noise was unpredictable than when it was not. This finding suggests that more attention had been directed to the unpredictable than the predictable noise. In Experiments 2 and 3, subjects were exposed to either predictable or unpredictable noise and were either instructed to attend to the noise or given no special instructions. In both cases, subjects not instructed to attend to the noise reported more severe symptoms when the noise was unpredictable than when it was not, thus replicating the previous finding. Of greater interest, however, was the fact that equating the amount of attention directed to the unpredictable and predictable noise (by asking subjects to attend to the noise) eliminated the apparent benefits of predictability. The discussion of the findings centers on their theoretical and practical significance.

Allocation of attention and the Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern.

Three studies were conducted to assess the attentional style of individuals with the Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern. Experiment 1, which made use of a dual-task paradigm, revealed that Type A's focus their attention on central tasks; thus, they attend less to peripheral tasks than do Type B's. Experiments 2 and 3, which used a single task performed in the presence of a distracting stimulus, indicated that Type A's actively inhibit or suppress their attention to task-irrelevant peripheral events that might distract them from task performance. These findings validated anecdotal observations that Type A's appear hyperalert (focused in their attention) but neglect task-irrelevant cues. Previous research has demonstrated that Type A's fail to report fatigue as well as a variety of other physical symptoms of illness during task performance. To the extent that symptoms are analogous to peripheral events that distract from task performance, the data suggest that Type A's suppress their attention to symptoms. Implications of the attentional style of Type A's for the pathogenesis of coronary artery and heart disease are discussed.