Cardiovascular Psychophysiology: Measures

Andrew Sherwood & Joel W. Hughes

The existence of physiological concomitants of emotional stress has long been recognized, but only relatively recently have they been the subject of systematic scientific inquiry. Historically, Walter B. Cannon's 1915 landmark text, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage , set the stage for the field of cardiovascular psychophysiology, which has emerged with the objective of documenting cardiovascular correlates of behavior, with particular emphasis on the effects of stress. A guiding research hypothesis has been that psychological stress may contribute to the development of cardiovascular disease and also to the occurrence of acute clinical events such as heart attack in patients rendered susceptible by preexisting disease. Therefore, considerable effort has been devoted to characterizing responses of the cardiovascular system elicited by stress in order to illuminate the physiological mechanisms whereby stress may be implicated in cardiovascular pathophysiology. For the past 50 years, research on the effects of stress on ...

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