AccScience Publishing / JCBP / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/jcbp.8134
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

Affective response accuracy and emotion regulation influence short-term blood pressure variability among healthy young adults

Xiao Yang1* ,  Catalina Roldan1 ,  Cathryn Gallagher1 ,  Katie Heberlein1 ,  Fang Fang2
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1 Department of Psychology, College of Sciences, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, United States of America
2 Department of Internal Medicine, Eastern Virginia Medical School, Norfolk, Virginia, United States of America
JCBP, 8134 https://doi.org/10.36922/jcbp.8134
Submitted: 23 December 2024 | Revised: 11 March 2025 | Accepted: 11 April 2025 | Published: 25 April 2025
© 2025 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
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Abstract

High blood pressure (BP) variability is a modified risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Short-term BP variability (BPV) has been associated with atypical emotional processes that are implicated in depression. Moreover, emotion regulation (ER) and affective perception play important roles in those emotional processes. The present study aimed to investigate whether ER and the perception of affective stimuli are associated with short-term BPV in a preclinical population. The sample consisted of 54 healthy young adults. Systolic and diastolic BP (SBP and DBP) were recorded using a standardized protocol of the upper-arm-cuff approach, and BPV was calculated as ranges and intra-individual standard deviations (SD) of six measures of SBP and DBP. ER was assessed by the ER questionnaire, which provided scores for the habitual use of expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal. In addition, a computerized affective perception task was used to evaluate the accuracy of affective responses. Multiple regressions were used to test whether ER and emotional response accuracy predicted the measures of BPV, and the analyses were controlled for gender and age. Results showed that among participants showing high affective response accuracy, expressive suppression was positively associated with the intra-individual SD of SBP, whereas cognitive reappraisal was negatively related to the range and SD of diastolic BP. Our findings suggest that individual differences in the use of different ER strategies influence BPV, which may account for the negative effect of affective disorders on cardiovascular health.

Keywords
Blood pressure variability
Affective response accuracy
Emotion regulation
Depression
Cardiovascular disease
Funding
None.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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