Abstract
Background: The biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat specifies a challenge-threat continuum where favorable demand-resource evaluations, efficient cardiovascular responses, and superior performance characterize challenge; and maladaptive outcomes like clinical depression characterize threat states. The model also specifies task engagement, operationalized as heart rate and ventricular contractility increases, as a prerequisite for challenge and threat states. The blunted cardiovascular reactivity to stress literature describes reductions of these increases and associates them with problems like clinical depression.Objectives: To determine whether blunted cardiovascular reactivity to stress has implications for challenge and threat theory.Methods: We review and synthesize the literatures on blunted cardiovascular reactivity to stress and the biopsychosocial model.Results: Blunted cardiovascular reactivity appears not to reflect a physiological inability to respond to stress. Rather, it reflects a contextually dependent motivational dysregulation and reduced reactivity to stress consistent with deficient task engagement in the biopsychosocial model.Conclusion: We argue that blunted cardiovascular reactivity represents deficient task engagement, and more generally, motivational disengagement due to threat states. Our biopsychosocial model-based approach conceptualizes this motivational disengagement as a tendency to avoid motivated performance situations. This tendency may represent a defense mechanism against subsequent threat and might explain associations with disorders like clinical depression.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 355-369 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Anxiety Stress and Coping |
Volume | 33 |
Issue number | 4 |
Early online date | 24 Apr 2020 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 3 Jul 2020 |
Keywords
- ACUTE PSYCHOLOGICAL STRESS
- ANHEDONIC SYMPTOMS
- AVOIDANCE
- CORTISOL REACTIONS
- Cardiovascular responses
- LIFE EVENTS
- MAJOR DEPRESSIVE DISORDER
- PERFORMANCE
- RESPONSES
- REWARD
- SELF
- clinical depression
- demand-resource evaluations
- motivational disengagement
- task engagement