Spouses’
cardiovascular
reactivity to their
partners’ suffering
Courtney Roberts
Caregiver May Experience…
• Physical symptoms
• Psychological distress
• Existential or spiritual stress
• Emotional distress
• Likely to mediate link between partners’ suffering and caregivers’ increased risk
for cardiovascular disease
Aims of the Study
• Examine the extent to which exposure to a partner’s suffering
affects cardiovascular reactivity in an experimental setting
• Examine the extent to which the nature of the relationship
influenced a person’s cardiovascular response to another person’s
suffering
• Relationship type and closeness can influence emotional and physiological convergence
between two individuals
• Compared cardiovascular reactivity to spouses’ versus opposite-sex
strangers’ physical suffering while performing a pain-eliciting task
Hypothesis of Study
• Exposure to suffering in a laboratory setting will uniquely influence
caregiving spouses’ cardiovascular functioning
• Watching a stranger perform a pain-eliciting task will increase caregivers’ systolic
and diastolic BP and heart rate compared with watching a habituation stimulus
• Caregivers will have higher BP and HR responses to watching a partner’s than a
stranger’s physical suffering
• Talking about the partner’s physical, psychological, and spiritual suffering will
increase the caregiver’s BP and HR compared with talking about a mundane
interaction like having lunch with a partner
Participants of the Study
• 53 care recipients with Osteoarthritis and their caregiving spouses
• 27 women and 26 men; about 69 years old
Preparation of Participants
• Habituation Video- 2 standardized videos were made of a healthy
older man and healthy older woman, each walking back and forth
across an 8-ft. space for 3 minutes without expressing any pain
• Stranger performing pain-eliciting log task- 2 standardized videos
were made of one older male “stranger” and one older female
“stranger” expressing pain while performing a log-carrying task for
3 minutes; strangers were instructed to freely express pain verbally
and nonverbally as they experienced it
• Examined overall differences in pain expression between the stranger and
partner videos using independent observers
• 10 independent observers rated the pain expression of one of the stranger
videos and one of the 10 randomly selected partner videos on a scale from
0-10
Procedure
• Videotaping the care recipient perform the pain-eliciting log task- each
couple came into the laboratory for a 2-hour session; the experimenter
escorted the caregiver to a waiting room. The care recipient was
videotaped performing the pain-eliciting log-carrying task in a separate
area of the lab. The care recipient was instructed to freely express pain
verbally and nonverbally as he or she experienced it.
• Baseline- next, the caregiver was taken to a sound and electrically
shielded chamber that was used to separate the caregiver from the
external lab environment and reduce electrical noise in the physiological
recordings.
• Habituation & exposure to partner’s and stranger’s physical sufferingCaregiver privately viewed the habituation stimulus, then they watched
the videotape either of his/her partner or opposite sex stranger
performing log-carrying task.
• Verbal accounts of mundane reaction- caregivers were asked to give 2
verbal accounts about the care recipient.
BP, HR, and Relationship
• For each condition, a systolic BP and diastolic BP mean were
calculated by averaging each of the 3 automated measurements
taken over the 3-min periods
• Caregivers were asked to report their level of marital satisfaction
using the Marital Adjustment Test at the beginning of the lab
session in a separate room from their spouse
• 16 item measure with different rating lebels
Results
• Significant effects of gender on baseline BP such that men had
higher systolic and diastolic BP than women; older caregivers had
higher systolic BP at baseline
• Medications did not have a significant effect on any of the
physiological indicators
• Caregivers are physiologically reactive to suffering
• Results were consistent with hypotheses
• No significant effects of marital satisfaction on changes in
reactivity from control to experimental condition for any of the
physiological indicators
Implications of the Study
• Merely observing the suffering of partners or talking about the suffering
of partners affects caregivers’ well-being
• Future research should examine different types of relationships
• Interventions that address a partner’s suffering have received little
attention in the caregiver intervention literature
• Intervention strategies that directly affect the suffering of the care
recipient may be particularly effective in alleviating caregiver distress
• The results of the study indicate that heightened cardiovascular stress
caused by exposure to a loved one’s suffering may be one pathway to
caregivers’ increases risk for cardiovascular disease
• Major strength: one of the first to use experimental methods with
ecologically valid stimuli to examine emotional processes in the context of
caring for older adults
• Important implications for interventions suggest that caregivers are likely
to benefit from efforts to alleviate care recipients’ suffering