Inter-task Consistency: An Integrative Re-evaluation
The paper was written while the author was a British Medical Research Council Fellow. Thanks are expressed to Dorothy Faulkner for manuscript preparation and typing.
The author is now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
ABSTRACT
In contrast to results presented by other investigators, several previous reports from this laboratory have documented low inter-task consistency of heart rate responses to pairs of active psychological challenges. In an attempt to resolve this discrepancy, our data were re-examined in two ways. The first involved taking into account the precise metabolic demands of each task; the second way involved consideration of the order in which tasks were undertaken. Analyses resulting from each of these strategies increased the magnitudes of correlation coefficients calculated from heart rate responses to the pairs of tasks. A combination of the two approaches led to increases in coefficient magnitudes from .32 to .50, and from .46 to .74 for the data from two recent studies. The re-analysis presented in this paper thus indicated a reconciliation between our previous assessments of inter-task consistency and those reported by other research groups.
