Type A behavior pattern, personality factors, disease, and physiological reactivity: A meta-analytic update

Research on the Type A behavior pattern (TABP) has declined in the last years, presumably in response to several large-scale prospective studies which failed to find an association between TABP and coronary heart disease (CHD). Quantitative reviews of the connection between TABP and CHD or TABP and physiological reactivity were published several years ago. These reviews, for the most part did not use effect sizes, but rather the Stouffer method based on adding the standard normal deviations z. The present meta-analysis uses the correlation coefficient r as effect size to yield information on the population effect and variance. The population effect size for TABP and CHD is r = 0.009, a figure so low that it has no practical meaning. Evidence for increased blood pressure reactivity in Type A subjects described in earlier studies is not substantiated by more recent investigations. The population effect sizes for other cardiovascular and peripheral parameters are very small, some supporting and others contradicting the hypothesis of hyperreactivity in Type A subjects. No evidence was found for a significant effect on catecholamine response.