Cardiovascular responses to an extended aversive video game task.

Active coping stressors, which tend to produce increases in cardiac output disproportionate to metabolic need, may elicit compensatory autoregulatory responses elevating peripheral resistance if exposure is prolonged. Two studies (total N=24) were conducted in which healthy male undergraduates participated in both one-hour shock avoidance and separate counterbalanced baseline sessions. In an attempt to maximize subject involvement, a somewhat unconventional, complex shock avoidance procedure was employed. The subject could avoid mild electric shocks depending on video game performance. The primary dependent measures were heart rate, digital blood volume pulse (DBVP), and blood pressure. In both studies, most subjects exhibited immediate and pronounced increases in heart rate in response to the stressor, followed by some habituation. In contrast, DBVP responses did not usually habituate. Similarly, blood pressure was more or less constantly elevated by the stressor. The results of multiple regression analyses indicated that individual differences in mean arterial blood pressure response to the stressor were significantly related to individual differences in heart rate response to the first 15 minutes, but increasingly unrelated to heart rate response, and more related to DBVP response, as the session progressed.