Parking ticket writers in New York City are helping scientists understand how heart rate and blood pressure respond to verbal conflict.
It turns out their blood pressure and heart rate soars highest not when speaking with supervisors or co-workers, but with members of the public, and the effects stay with them even after the contact has terminated.
Small wonder: an average of three times a day each TEA has a hostile confrontation with a member of the public. He or she might be yelled at, insulted, harassed, or threatened, according to Elizabeth Brondolo, Ph.D., and her colleagues at St. John's University, Jamaica, New York, and State University of New York at Stonybrook. Their study is reported in the January issue of the journal Psychophysiology.
"We chose traffic agents to work with because we were looking for a real life model of interpersonal conflict," says Dr. Brondolo. "We knew that anger was related to heart disease, and we were trying to identify the mechanisms through which that occurs.
"Traffic agents unfortunately have a lot of interpersonal conflicts with motorists who are angry about receiving tickets. We wanted to see what their blood pressure was while they were having these conflicts."
The 115 TEAs participating in the study wore blood pressure cuffs that inflated automatically and took readings every 15 minutes throughout their workday and kept timer-recorded diaries of the day's events.
The data they collected "suggest that interpersonal communication may be a valuable behavior to study in investigations of cardiovascular reactivity," the researchers say. "Social interactions occur sufficiently frequently to make it plausible that blood pressure reactivity during these contacts could have a cumulative negative effect" on the heart. And individual differences in the way persons react to the verbal exchanges could account for differences in risk for cardiovascular disease.
In return for helping the scientists, the participating TEAs are getting help with handling the stress of dealing daily with peevish and angry motorists. With their risk factors in mind, Brondolo and her colleagues are offering conflict management and stress reduction training to the traffic agents and their supervisors in cooperation with their union, the Communications Workers of Americas.
The research is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the New York State Department of Labor, and the American Heart Association.
Psychophysiology is the official peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Psychophysiological Research. For information about the journal, contact its editor, Gregory A. Miller, Ph.D., 217-333-6312.
Posted by the Center for the Advancement of Health http://www.cfah.org. For information about the Center contact Richard Hébert, rhebert@cfah.org 202-387-2829.
Journal
Psychophysiology