Hostility

Individual differences in anger, hostility, and aggressiveness have always been of interest to basic and applied behavioral scientists, given the importance of these aspects of emotion and social behavior in many different domains—including personal relationships. Much of the recent interest in this topic stems from findings that these personality traits are associated with reduced longevity, increased risk of death, and the leading cause of death in industrialized societies—cardiovascular diseases such as coronary heart disease and stroke. The health consequences of hostility may involve the fact that these personality traits are also associated with difficulties in personal relationships, such as low social support, marital strain, and risk for divorce. Strain, disruption, and low support in personal relationships, in turn, confer increased risk of premature mortality and specific serious health problems such as cardiovascular disease. This entry discusses the association of hostility with health, mechanisms underlying this association, and the potential health benefits of interventions that modify this trait.

The term hostility has both a general and a specific use in this literature. In the specific sense, it refers to a collection of cognitive characteristics involving negative attitudes toward others, primarily consisting of ill will, a tendency to denigrate others, and enmity. Closely related traits include cynicism, mistrust, and a hostile attributional style. Cynicism refers to the belief that people are generally motivated by selfish concerns rather than by genuine concern for others, and mistrust is the expectation that other people are likely to be sources of mistreatment. A hostile attributional style involves the tendency to view the actions of others as reflecting aggressive intentions. Hence, as a cognitive trait, hostility involves the a desire to inflict harm or see others harmed, a relational view of being in opposition to others, the expectation that other people are likely sources of wrongdoing, and a tendency to devalue their motives and worth.

These cognitive or attitudinal traits often co-occur with affective and behavioral characteristics, consistent with the use of hostility in the more general sense. For example, trait anger refers to the tendency to experience anger frequently and intensely, often with little provocation and for a prolonged period. Related emotional traits are the tendency to experience resentment and contempt for others. Aggressiveness refers to the tendency toward verbally or even physically hurtful, attacking, or destructive actions. Although hostility refers most precisely to the cognitive facet of this interrelated set of traits, the term is sometimes used to refer to the overall set of cognitive, affective, and behavioral characteristics.

For centuries, medical writers have speculated that hostile personality traits contribute to the development and often lethal outcome of cardiovascular disease. The earliest descriptions of coronary syndromes in the medical literature also contained speculations that psychological stress and strong negative emotions such as anger contributed to the disease. Current interest in this hypothesis began when researchers attempted to identify specific unhealthy elements within the broad and multifaceted Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern, comprising achievement-striving, competitiveness, impatience and time-urgency, excessive job involvement, as well as easily provoked hostility. Decades of subsequent research have produced mixed but generally converging evidence that hostility, anger, and related traits are associated with reduced longevity, atherosclerosis, [Page 819]incident coronary heart disease, recurrent coronary events, stroke, and death from cardiovascular disease.

...