According to a study conducted by Irish university researchers with 68 adults, gratitude has a unique stress-buffering effect on reactions to and recovery from acute psychological stress, which can help to improve cardiovascular health.
Gratitude has a special stress-buffering effect on responses to and recovery from acute psychological stress, which can help to improve cardiovascular health, according to researchers from Irish institutions. Understanding how we respond to stress and figuring out whether there are any variables that can play significant stress-buffering roles is crucial given that stress affects humans and has an impact on their health and well-being, specifically causing high blood pressure and increasing cardiovascular morbidity and coronary heart disease.
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According to Brian Leavy, Brenda H. O’Connell, and Deirdre O’Shea’s article “Gratitude, Affect Balance, and Stress Buffering: A Growth Curve Examination of Cardiovascular Responses to a Laboratory Stress Task," published in January in the Journal of Psychophysiology, although prior studies have suggested that gratitude and affect balance play important stress-buffering roles, little is known about their effects on cardiovascular recovery from accutane.
That was the main goal of the study conducted by scientists from the Irish Universities of Maynooth and Limerick. They also wanted to know if affect balance influenced the link between thankfulness and the cardiovascular effects of acute psychological stress.
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68 undergraduate students, aged between 18 and 57, from the Irish University of Maynooth participated in the study (24 men and 44 women). This study employed a within-subjects experimental design using lab tasks in which individuals were exposed to stress before having their cardiovascular responses to that stress and recovery assessed.
The finding shows that state gratitude predicted lower systolic blood pressure responses throughout the stress-testing period, indicating that the feeling of gratitude has a special stress-buffering impact on both responses to and recovery from acute psychological stress. Additionally, it was discovered that the impact of state appreciation is amplified by affect balancing.
These findings are clinically relevant because a number of low-cost thankfulness therapies can improve wellbeing (Wood et al., 2010). For instance, prior study has demonstrated that cardiac patients who keep gratitude notebooks fare better than those who do not (Redwine et al., 2016).
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Gratitude may therefore represent a valuable point of intervention for the enhancement of our cardiovascular health when combined with the findings of this study and earlier research.
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