Mirror tracing and the provocation of vascular-dominant reaction pattern through heightened attention

After a hint from Lang et al.'s (1997) defence cascade, researchers considered cognitive process experienced when encountering mental stress to be composed of four elements: (serially) first attention (Attent), second unpleasant affect (UnplAff) and sometimes pleasant affect (PlAff), and third cognitive coping (CogCop). The present study investigates the effect of each cognitive element on the provocation of the well-known vascular-dominant reaction pattern during mirror tracing: elevation of mean blood pressure mainly because of increases in total peripheral resistance. Twenty-four male students first underwent four computer-simulated mirror-tracing practices of 3 min each, then a 7 min adaptation followed by a 3 min baseline, and further four kinds of actual mirror tracing trials (Attent, UnplAff, PlAff, and CogCop) of 3 min each. Results on the cardiovascular measures indicated that every mirror-tracing trial indisputably provoked the vascular-dominant reaction pattern. An alpha-adrenergic vascular sympathetic activation was heightened. Self-report measures on the four cognitive elements suggested that heightened Attent seemed to contribute to provoking the reaction pattern. Although the UnplAff and PlAff trials had an active coping features in a narrow sense, they could not provoke the cardiac-dominant reaction pattern. Differences in task difficulty among the mirror tracings could not explain the results. The implications of these results are discussed in order to better understand cardiovascular hemodynamics during mental stress.