Now there is another reason to keep that blood pressure in check.  New research suggests that high blood pressure can lead to an inability to recognize and process emotions especially happiness, sadness, anger and fear.

A recent study conducted by Clemson University psychology professor James A. McCubbin and colleagues has shown that people with higher blood pressure have reduced ability to recognize certain emotions in others.

This can prove difficult in situations where reading other’s facial expressions are crucial such as at work or in meetings.

“Emotional Dampening”  as McCubbin has dubbed it, causes individuals to  respond inappropriately to anger or other emotions in others.

McCubbin believes that the link between dampening of emotions and blood pressure is its involvement  in the development of hypertension and risk for coronary heart disease, the biggest killer of both men and women in the U.S.

An interesting finding of this study is that McCubbin’s theory of emotional dampening applies to positive emotions as well.  “If you have emotional dampening, you may distrust others because you cannot read emotional meaning in their face or their verbal communications,” he said. “You may even take more risks because you cannot fully appraise threats in the environment.”

Do you think this preliminary research needs to be ongoing before making such conclusions? Or Do you fully agree perhaps because you know someone or are that someone who has high blood pressure and who shows signs of  “emotional dampening”?

Researchers at the MPI for Psycholinguistics and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology have set out to answer the question, does our understanding of emotions depend on the language we speak, or is our perception the same regardless of language and culture?

ScienceDaily reports on Understanding Emotions without Language. This new study, which suggests that emotions evolved as a set of basic human mechanisms, compared speakers of German to speakers of Yucatec  Maya, which has only one word for the emotions of disgust and anger.

“Earlier research has found that people who have different words for two emotions do better on this task when the dominant emotion in the two photographs is different, like when one is mainly angry and the other one is mainly disgusted,” explains Disa Sauter. “But is this because they internally label the faces angry and disgusted, or is it because emotions are processed by basic human mechanisms that have categories like anger and disgust regardless of whether we have words for those feelings?”

The studies results were published in Emotion a journal of the APA.  “Our results show that understanding emotional signals is not based on the words you have in your language to describe emotions,” Sauter says. “Instead, our findings support the view that emotions have evolved as a set of basic human mechanisms…”