Negative emotion and coronary heart disease. A review.
Depression, anger, and anxiety each worsen heart disease, but brief emotion-regulation training can ease both mood and cardiac risk.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Najdowski et al. (2003) looked at every paper they could find on negative feelings and heart disease.
They pulled studies on depression, anger, and anxiety in adults with coronary heart disease.
The team wrote a plain-language summary of what hurts hearts and what might help.
What they found
Each bad mood—depression, anger, or anxiety—makes heart disease worse on its own.
Multicomponent behavioral plans can lower these risks and protect the heart.
How this fits with other research
Holmedal Byrne et al. (2024) tested one of these plans. A six-week group that taught positive emotion skills cut anxiety and depression scores in adults.
The 2003 review predicted this would work, and the 2024 trial shows it does.
Reed (1991) saw the same link in sick kids: illness brings depression. C et al. simply moved the lens to adults with heart trouble.
Why it matters
If your client has heart disease, treat mood as a medical target, not a side note. Add brief emotion-regulation lessons to your behavior plan. Track heart-health markers alongside behavior data. You may help both mood and medical outcomes in one shot.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This article reviews literature regarding the influence of negative emotions, specifically depression, anger/hostility, and anxiety on coronary heart disease (CHD). For each domain, evidence is presented demonstrating the deleterious effects of negative affect on health outcomes in patients with CHD. This is followed by a discussion of the manner in which emotional factors are transduced into cardiac health risk factors. The pathophysiological mechanisms by which negative emotions have been found to exert an influence on CHD are highlighted. Finally, a general overview of the outcomes of interventions designed to ameliorate the effects of these negative emotional states on cardiovascular health are reviewed. Several treatment studies are described in detail for the purpose of elaborating the types of multicomponent interventions that attempt to address negative emotions in populations with CHD.
Behavior modification, 2003 · doi:10.1177/0145445502238695