Studies on risk factors associated with heart diseases emphasize the negative emotions and do not enlighten the cardiologic effects in response to joy or security. It was carried out an investigation with 30 people, submitted to 24 hours Holter monitoring, aiming at identifying emotions and episodes of daily life that occur simultaneously with cardiac arrhythmias. In doing so, records of arrhythmias, activities and emotions were gathered, additionally supported by semi-structured interviews. Great gender differences were found: women presented more arrhythmias than men. In women, ventricular arrhythmias occurred more simultaneously to worries than with respect to anxiety and were not related to anger. In both genders sadness was not associated with ventricular arrhythmias.
emotions; cardiac arrhythmias; Holter; gender
