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            Hostility can harm the heart as much as smoking and high blood pressure do, Dr. Redford B. Williams, Jr., of Duke University believes.  At an American Heart Association seminar, Williams described research on hostility as measured in the widely used Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.  A Duke University of North Carolina study of 255 physicians who had taken this test as medical students found a death rate over the next 25 years of 14 percent among those with hostility scores in the upper 50 percent; those who scored lower had only 2½  percent death rate.  Heart Disease was five times as common among the hostile group.

            To Williams, hostility consists of an attitude of dislike and distrust of people in general.  Those who have such an outlook are more likely to express anger.  This attitude may also be, he suggests, the dangerous element in the heart-attack-prone, impatient Type A personality.  Type A people are reportedly about twice as likely to die of heart disease as the more relaxed Type B people.

Reader’s Digest, September, 1983, page 196