In 2003
researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago tested a group of 3308 young
adults to determine whether impatience, competitiveness, hostility, depression
and anxiety had any effects on a person's chances of developing hypertension
(constant high blood pressure, often leading to health problems).
(For instance, the
scientists found that hostility was the only trait that dramatically influenced
hypertension. Depression had a slight effect, while impatience had none at all.)
In fact, those who
respond to life’s challenges with anger are SEVEN times more likely to die
prematurely from heart disease than those with the same lifestyle (including
similar exercise and dietary habits) but different temperament!
In
studies conducted on the effect of arguing and hostility, psychologist Janice
Kiecolt-Glaser showed that, the more hostile people are during marital
arguments, the more suppressed are their immune systems. High levels of stress –
and more important – an impaired ability to cope with stress – caused the immune
system to weaken and make the body more vulnerable to infections.
Redford
Williams, the Duke University physician perhaps most responsible for focusing
attention on the hostility component of Type A personalities, writes extensively
about the particular dangers of “unrealistic anger.” He warns against trying to
assert control over something that does not need correcting or that cannot be
corrected — an approach at which Type A’s tend to excel.
Similar
ideas are emphasized by David Spiegel, the Stanford psychiatrist who surprised
both the medical community and himself with his observations that a supportive
therapy setting caused a significant extension of survival time in breast cancer
patients. “We encourage our patients to hope for the best, but prepare for the
worst,” he writes, citing research to show that increasing a patient’s sense of
control over the future course of the disease is associated with an
increase in spirit, whereas increasing a patient’s belief in her control over
what caused the disease produces the opposite. Once again, if the outcome
of something is awful, it does not do great things for morale to be led to
believe that you had the power to have prevented it.
Hostility creates unhappiness in nearest and dearest:
Weissman’s careful comparison of 40 depressed people (men and women) with 40
nondepressed ones showed that depressed people are anything but unaggressive in
intimate relationships. They displayed ‘significantly more overt interpersonal
hostility in most relationships, and the intensity of these feelings ranged from
resentment, general irritability, through arguments of increasing intensity, to
physical encounters’.
The
brunt of this hostility was borne by their children, with whom they had twice as
much friction as their spouses. However, they were also significantly more
hostile to their spouses than to their extended family members, friends and
professional colleagues: ‘Marital relationships become an arena for the
depression and are characterized by friction, poor communication, dependency and
diminished sexual satisfaction. The depressed person feels a lack of affection
towards the spouse together with guilt and resentment. Communication is poor and
hostility overt.
The
negative effects of hostility are not limited to depressives. Partners of any
hostiles are themselves more likely to be depressed, to get ill, to abuse
alcohol and to commit both suicide and homicide. The relationship suffers.
Compared with couples where neither party is hostile, in couples with one
hostile person who is more likely to be domineering and overbearingly insistent
in solving disputes, the couple is likely to use destructive methods for doing
so, to feel miserable about the relationship, be secretive and incommunicative
and provide little support to each other.
