Unit Eighteen
Type-A Personality and Heart Disease
If you're a classic "Type A" personality -- hard-driving, impatient, competitive, intense, easily irritated – you are far more likely than a calm, laid-back "Type B" to suffer a heart attack, right?
Wrong, says a Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatrist who has studied more than 200 heart patients awaiting disgnostic tests and found virtually no correlation between classic Type A personalities and subsequent heart disease.
What does appear to be a predictor of serious heart trouble, says Dr. Joel E.Dimsdale, director of the MGH Stress Physiology Laboratory, is a chronic inability to deal constructively with anger and hostility.
He is now doing a study on anger and heart disease. The original insight that people could be classified into Type A and Type B personalities and that Type A's were more heart-attack prone grew out of research at the framingham Heart Study laboratories in the late 1970s.
Since the early studies, the A-B issue has been getting weaker. A large prospective study last year showed the A-B behavior distinction was not associated with coronary artery disease. Now researchers are thinking in terms of "anger in " vs. "anger out" as the latest area of concern.
Behavioral epidemiologist Elaine Eaker at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, one of the nation's foremost scholars of correlations between behavior and heart disease, agrees in principle.
Since holding anger inside may lead to heart trouble and since acting it out by having temper tantrums is highly antisocial, Faker says researchers now advocate maturely "discussing" anger – either with the person who makes you angry or with a friend -- as the most constructive method of dealing with explosive feelings.
Since the early Type A studies, researchers have been attempting to fine-tune the ways in which they can identify a person as Type A or Type B, not an easy task since people often deny or are actually unaware of some facets of their personalities and hence cannot be asked point-blank if they are angry or impatient by nature.
Dimsdale used both pencil-and-paper questionnaires and a "semistructured" interview technique to identify Type A personalities among heart patients. In the interview, he explained, "you ask questions slowly and sometimes even in a stammer and then see how rapidly the person will finish the sentence for you." People who rush to answer are usually highly impatient and impatience has long been considered a major component of Type A behavior.
Yet, no matter whether he used the self-report questionnaires or the more subtle interview technique, people identified as Type A's did not fare worse than the others.
laid-back a.松弛的,悠闲的,懒散的
irritate vt.1.使恼怒,使烦躁 2.使(身体某部分)不适,使疼痛
psychiatrist n.精神科医生,精神病专家
diagnose vt.诊断,判断
diagnostic a.诊断的,用于诊断的
[联想词]
syndrome n.综合病症,综合病状
prescription n.1.处方,药方 2.开处方,开药方
pharmacy n. 1.药房,药店 2.药剂学,配药
correlate vt.使相互关联 vi.相关,关联
correlation n.相互关系;联系
physiology n.1.生理学 2.生理,生理机能
physiological a.生理学的
chronic a.1.慢性的,久病的 2.长久的,不断的 3.积习难改的
hostility n.1.敌对,敌意,对抗 2.抵制,反对 3.交战,战争
[联想词]
hospitality n.友好款待,好客
hostage n.人质
boycott vt.抵制,拒绝参与
artery n.1.动脉 2.干线,要道
[联想词]
intersection n.道路交叉口,交点
junction n.联结点,会合点,交叉口,枢纽
prone a.1.易于…的,很可能的 2.俯卧的
[联想词]
apt a.1.易于…的,有(做某事的)倾向的 2.恰当的,适宜的 3.聪明的
prospective a.预期的,未来的,可能的
epidemic n.流行,流传,感染 a.流行性的,流传极广的
epidemiologist n.流行病学家
formost a.首要的,最佳的
[联想词]
optimum n.最合适的,最优的,最佳的
tantrum n.发脾气
questionnaire n.问卷,征求意见表
identify vt.1.认出,鉴定 2.把…等同于 vi.认同
indentification n.1.身份证明 2.鉴定,验明,认出 3.认同
stammer n.结巴,口吃
subtle a.1.微妙的,难于捉摸的 2.诡秘的,狡诈的 3.隐约的
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