Self-involvement, hostility, and Type A behavior and coronary atherosclerosis

Abstract

The aim of this investigation was to clarify the relationships among the self-involvement, hostility and Type A behavior variables, and to determine to what extent the various combinations of these variables, as well as accepted cardiac risk factors, are linked to the coronary atherosclerotic disease (CAD) process. It accomplished this by determining the severity or absence of CAD for each of 84 subjects through three angiographic measures and, subsequently, by comparing the results of subjects across the spectrum of self-involvement, hostility and Type A scores. To measure self-involvement, this study utilized the Self-Focus Sentence Completion developed by Exner, a psychometrically sound 30 item pencil completion blank. Hostility was assessed by the Cook and Medley Hostility Inventory, and the Type A behavior pattern was measured by the Jenkins Activity Survey (Form C).;Only two traditional risk factors (history of a previous myocardial infarction (Ml) and sex) were found to be significantly related to CAD. Once Ml was considered, a two variable model (self-involvement + hostility) was found to be the most salient and significant predictor of two CAD endpoints. Moreover, the self-involvement and hostility variables were shown to be additive rather than interactive in terms of their ability to predict CAD. Evidence is presented which argues that these associations are not the consequence of a retrospective bias. Thus, the major conclusion of this study is that self-involvement and hostility, but not Type A behavior, are the most important behavioral predictors of CAD.