BALTIMORE -- A cynical and mistrustful personality apparently leads to greater blood pressure fluctuations for blacks than whites, which could help explain blacks' higher heart disease rates, a Duke University researcher reported Friday at the American Psychosomatic Society meeting here.
Large variations in systolic blood pressure have been linked to the development of heart disease, says psychologist James Lane. So has a suspicious, hostile personality. Overall, blacks tend to score higher on tests for such hostility, he says.
Lane and co-author Redford Williams examined whether the most hostile -- those in the upper third on the test -- had more blood pressure variability than less hostile people. The team had 152 healthy whites and blacks wear blood pressure cuffs and took more than 50 measurements from them over 24 hours.
The most hostile whites had no more blood pressure variability than less hostile whites or blacks. But the most hostile blacks had about 25% more variability in their systolic blood pressure readings than the others. "Hostility may be a more important heart disease risk factor for blacks than whites," Lane says.
Suspicious, cynical blacks may be perceiving more threats around them than whites or other blacks who are less hostile, he says. "They may interpret innocuous events as threatening" because of their expectations, "and then you get the fight-or-flight response, which raises their blood pressure."
But sometimes "things are not as innocuous as they seem if you've had bad experiences before," says Vickie Mays, a psychologist who directs a UCLA center on minority health disparities. "A white person could walk down the street and see a policeman and think he's just directing traffic, but an African-American may feel less safe because of what's happened to him in the past."
Mays, who is black, recounts an incident when she was at a business meeting at a five-star resort. Other guests spoke to her in a way that made it clear they assumed she was an employee. "I could have gotten really upset, but I don't want to be pulled away from my goals ... so I just moved on."
Suspicious blacks, she says, do themselves a favor by "reframing" such incidents. "You need to think, 'If I let myself go there, it's bad for my health, it's not bad for their health.'"
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