Hostility is a multidimensional construct that has been extensively studied. It has been shown that hostility affects cognitive (Shimojima et al., 2003), behavioral (Prkachin & Silverman, 2002), visual (Herridge, Mollet, Harrison, & Shenal, in press), somatosensory (Herridge, Harrison, & Demaree, 1997a), auditory (Demaree & Harrison, 1997a), motor (Demaree et al., 2002) and pre-motor functioning (Williamson & Harrison, 2003). In order to extend and integrate the present literature on hostility and the effects of negative emotional state on cognition, the present investigation used a cold pressor to induce a negative emotional/pain state in high and low hostile participants and measured. The subsequent effects on the acquisition of the Auditory Affective Verbal Learning Test (AAVLT; Snyder & Harrison, 1997) were measured. Blood pressure (BP) readings were taken before and after the cold pressor to examine cardiovascular regulation in high and low hostiles. Further, before the first trial participants were asked to predict the number of words that they would be able to recall on the first trial. After completion of the experiment participants were asked to estimate their performance relative to other participants. The measures were used to assess self-awareness in high and low hostile participants, which may be impaired in high hostile individuals (Demaree & Harrison, 1997b). As expected, high hostiles learned negative emotional words significantly better than they learned positive words. Additionally, high hostiles were impaired in their acquisition of verbal material relative to low hostile participants. Low hostile participants learned more words faster and reached asymptote sooner. A significant primacy effect for negative emotional words and an overall better recall of negative information was found. Analysis on each of the four groups of the experiment indicated that participants in the cold pressor group performed similar to the high hostile participants. The cold pressor facilitated negative learning and also slowed verbal learning relative to the no cold pressor group. It was predicted that high and low hostiles would differ on baseline measures of systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and heart rate (HR) and that they would demonstrate increased cardiovascular reactivity in response to the cold pressor. These hypotheses were not supported. Self-awareness measures also failed to produce significance. These results support the proposal that high hostiles differ from low hostiles in a number of modalities. They demonstrate the persistence of negative emotional material. Future work should address what kinds of implications these factors have on high hostiles in daily interactions / Master of Science

During pregnancy, the basal activity is increased in both of our major stress response systems: the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. At the same time, the reactivity towards stressors is reduced. These alterations sustain maternal and fetal homeostasis, and are involved in the regulation of gestational length. Although the feto-placental hormone synthesis produces the main endocrinological changes, also the central nervous system undergoes adaptation. Together, these profound adjustments have been suggested to make women’s mental health more vulnerable during pregnancy and postpartum period. The aim of this thesis was to examine factors connected to physiological stress responses during the late pregnancy in relation to pain, labour onset, emotional reactivity, and mental health. The first study examined the pain and sympathetic response during cold stress, in relation to time to delivery. Women with fewer days to spontaneous delivery had lower sympathetic reactivity, while no pain measure was associated with time to delivery. In the second study, acoustic startle response modulation was employed to study emotional reactivity during late gestation, and at four to six weeks postpartum. The startle response was measured by eye-blink electromyography, while the participants watched pleasant and unpleasant pictures, and positive and negative anticipation stimuli. A significant reduction in startle modulation by anticipation was found during the postpartum assessment. However, no startle modulation by pleasant, or unpleasant, pictures was detected at either time-point. The serum level of allopregnanolone, a neurosteroid implied in pregnancy-induced hyporeactivity, was analysed in relation to self-reported symptoms of anxiety and depression. Although the participants reported low levels of depression, the women with the highest depression scores had significantly lower levels of serum allopregnanolone. There was no correlation between allopregnanolone and anxiety scores. In the fourth study, the cortisol awakening response was compared between women with depression during pregnancy, women with depression prior to pregnancy, and women who had never suffered from depression. No group differences in cortisol awakening response during late pregnancy were found. The results are in line with the previously described pregnancy-induced hyporesponsiveness, and add to the knowledge on maternal stress hyporeactivity, gestational length, and maternal mental health.

As both a Working Memory (WM) task and as a more integrated reasoning process, moral decision making appears susceptible to interference by nociceptive stimuli. Differentiation, however, between conflicting occupation of WM resources and the influence of pain-induced autonomic activation as potential pathways of interaction represents a considerably more difficult task than simple measurement of WM performance. To clarify the basis of any noted effects, this study recorded both self-report pain intensity and Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) as a separate measure of autonomic activation under a cold pressor task using a sample of 122 undergraduate participants. Recorded pain and physiological data was compared to rates of utilitarian decision making in the provided moral dilemmas. While there were significantly lower rates of utilitarian decision making in the pain condition, a warm-water painless condition showed comparably decreased rates. Comparison with GSR data suggests that the pain condition did not induce a significantly heightened state of autonomic activation. This suggests that while divided attention or occupation of WM resources does effect patterns of moral decision making, this is not reliant on a nociceptive stimulus.