Agency, communion, and cardiovascular reactivity during marital interaction.

The concepts of agency and communion have been used to describe sex differences in vulnerability to specific stressor domains. This study examined blood pressure and heart rate responses of 60 married couples to experimental manipulations of disagreement (i.e., communion stressor) and achievement challenge (i.e., agency stressor). Consistent with predictions, disagreement elicited heightened cardiovascular reactivity among wives, but not husbands. In contrast, the achievement challenge elicited heightened cardiovascular reactivity among husbands, but not wives. Participants' responses to a circumplex measure of interpersonal appraisal were consistent with the interpretation of differential responses to agency and communion stressors. Results are congruent with a situational approach to sex differences in cardiovascular reactivity and illustrate the utility of interpersonal methods in the explication of psychosocial risk for cardiovascular disease.

Interpersonal control and cardiovascular reactivity: goals, behavioral expression, and the moderating effects of sex.

Cardiovascular responses to stressful stimuli have been implicated in the development of cardiovascular disease. However, the effects of social stressors on short-term changes in blood pressure and heart rate (i.e., cardiovascular reactivity [CVR]) are not well understood. The independent effects of an incentive to exert interpersonal influence and the expression of socially controlling behavior on CVR were examined in 96 undergraduates. For men, both the incentive to exert influence and the enactment of a controlling interpersonal style produced larger increases in systolic blood pressure. By contrast, although the incentive to be influential increased women's CVR, the enactment of a cooperative role produced the largest increases in blood pressure among women. The effects of social dominance on CVR, sex differences in CVR, and interpersonal approaches to the study of these psychophysiological mechanisms are discussed.