1)The original insight that people could be classified into Type A and Type B personalities and that Type A's were more heart-attack prone1 grew out of research at the Framingham Heart Study laboratories in the late 1970s.
　　Dr. Peter Wilson, director of the Framingham laboratories, agreed in a telephone interview last week that since the early studies, the AB issue has been getting weaker. 2)A large prospective study2 (in which people are followed for years before years before they get sick) last year showed the A-B behavior distinction was not associated with coronary artery disease.Now researchers are thinking in terms of “anger in” vs. “anger out” as the latest area of concern.
　　Behavioral epidemiologist Elaine Eaker at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, one of the nation's foremost scholars of correlations between behavior and heart disease, agrees in principle.
　　“There is no epidemiological evidence on hostility alone, but anger has been linked to CHD (coronary heart disease) events weakly for white collar men and more strongly for women in clerical jobs,” she said last week.
　　“The Type A concept is still viable because it has been a predictor of heart disease in at least two long-term studies. But recent research has shown that how you cope with anger may be the new coronary prone behavior of the future. And it's tough to cope with anger,” she added.
　　3)Since holding anger inside may lead to heart trouble and since acting it out by having temper tantrums is highly antisocial, Eaker says researchers now advocate maturely “discussing” anger—either with the person who makes you angry or with a friend—as the most constructive method of dealing with explosive feelings.
　　4)Since the early Type A studies, researchers have been attempting to fine-tune the ways in which they can identify a person as Type A or Type B, not an easy task since people often deny or are actually unaware of some facets of their personalities and hence can not be asked point-blank if they are angry or impatient by nature .
　　Dimsdale used both pencil-and-paper questionnaires and a “semi-structured” interview technique to identify Type A personalities among heart patients.
　　In the interviews, he explained, “you ask questions slowly and sometimes even in a stammer and then see how rapidly the person will finish the sentence for you.” People who rush to answer are usually highly impatient and impatience has long been considered a major component of Type A behavior.
　　5)Yet, no matter whether he used the self-report questionnaires or the more subtle interview technique, people identified as The A's did not fare worse than the others.