Abstract
Since great importance is attached in behavioral medicine and in health psychology to problems of prevention, it is only right that one of the most explored areas should be the assessment of psychosocial coronary risk factors. The best known of these factors is probably the Type A behavior pattern (TABP), a construct defined as the outcome of a person—situation interaction that emerges in certain individuals in appropriately stressful or challenging situations (Friedman & Rosenman, 1959). Since the TABP has come into use, there have been a host of studies clarifying the construct, its modes of assessment, and its association with the development of coronary heart disease (CHD). These studies have generated two metaanalyses (Booth-Kewley & Friedman, 1987; Matthews, 1988), which lead to the conclusion that the linkage between Type A and CHD is not particularly strong and may be considered meaningful only for certain populations and with certain modes of assessment. Both find that the strength of the linkage between TABP and CHD varies with the tools of assessment—significant if the assessment is conducted with the structured interview (SI), but less so with self-report inventories (Houston, 1988). It also appears that the value of the SI as predictor is proven in cross-sectional researches and in population-based prospective studies, but is drastically reduced in studies conducted on high-risk populations.
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Bertolotti, G. et al. (1994). Type A and Cardiovascular Responsiveness in Italian Blue Collar Workers. In: Carlson, J.G., Seifert, A.R., Birbaumer, N. (eds) Clinical Applied Psychophysiology. The Plenum Series in Behavioral Psychophysiology and Medicine. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9703-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9703-9_5
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