Should Tasks Producing Different Patterns of Responding Be Used to Assess Reactivity?
In the same way that individuals may differ with respect to their characteristic patterns of stress-related CVR, different types of tasks have been shown to evoke different patterns of acute change in cardiovascular performance. For example, exposure to shock avoidance has been shown to be generally associated with a cardiac pattern of response, whereas the mirror tracer task tends to evoke a vascular pattern of responding (13, 51). Two studies that have examined both individual and task effects on hemodynamic patterning have shown that one s tendency to respond with cardiac or vascular responding persists across different types of tasks. Kasprowicz et al. (13), for example, found that subjects characterized as cardiac or vascular reactors to mental arithmetic could be similarly distinguished during a mirror tracing task, even though the latter task elicited, on average, larger peripheral vascular responses than did mental arithmetic across the sample as a whole. Similar results were s
