High blood pressure may blunt emotional intelligence

(CBS) Does high blood pressure blunt emotional intelligence? New research links hypertension with reduced ability to recognize anger, fear, sadness, and other emotions in people's faces.

"It's like living in a world of email without smiley faces," Dr. James A. McCubbin, professor of psychology at Clemson University and the lead author of a new study on a phenomenon he calls "emotional dampening," said in a written statement. "We put smiley faces in emails to show when we are just kidding. Otherwise some people may misinterpret our humor and get angry."

McCubbin said emotional dampening make life hard at work as well as in personal relationships. He offered the example of an employee who mistakenly assumes that a boss is just joking when he/she is actually angry. "This can lead to miscommunication, poor job performance and increased psychosocial distress," he said.

Emotional dampening may make it hard for people to recognize the subtext of text messages as well as the meaning of facial expressions, McCubbin said.

For the study, McCubbin used a special test to gauge the ability to recognize the emotional "affect' in faces and sentences among a group of 106 African-American men and women, average age 53. He found that the emotion-recognizing ability to be reduced in people with high blood pressure, even after taking into account medication use and other factors.

It's not clear exactly why high blood pressure might mess with people's emotional savvy. But McCubbin concluded that his findings suggest "potentially important links among central nervous system regulation of emotions" and hypertension.

The study was published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.