Cardiovascular changes in anger up-regulation during goal pursuit

Abstract

People will choose anger-inducing stimuli when pursuing confrontation goals, which indicates an intention to up regulate anger. The physiological concomitants of these actions, however, are not clearly understood. The current study was aimed to gain insight into this phenomenon by assessing changes in heart rate variability (HRV) when listening to music selected to facilitate goal pursuit. Sixty-seven students prepared to negotiate solutions to current student-parking issues. Participants were given a negotiation goal (confrontation, collaboration, or control) and then chose an emotion-inducing song (angry, happy, or neutral) to listen to in preparation for negotiation. After listening to the song, participants wrote a goal-driven message to the Director of Parking. Primary analyses revealed no significant differences between goal groups. However, group differences revealed through exploratory analyses suggest that music with a more polarized valence (i.e., angry and happy music) may demand more attentional resources, which interferes with emotion regulation processes during goal pursuit.