Psychologist: It is well known that becoming angry often induces tempo

EXPLANATION FROM Fox LSAT

The first sentence says that becoming angry can cause incidents of high blood pressure. The second sentence says that a recent study shows a correlation between being easily angered and having permanently high blood pressure. The third sentence says there is a correlation between permanently high blood pressure and heart disease. The conclusion says, “Heart disease can be caused by psychological factors.”

This doesn’t quite all add up. It’s a very attenuated argument. The only causal premise is the first one: that becoming angry can cause temporary incidents of high blood pressure. From this, the argument ends up with a causal conclusion about heart disease, which is only shown to be correlated with permanently high blood pressure. I don’t have a great prediction here, but I think I can find it in the answer choices.

A) Recovery is irrelevant. The argument was only about the incidence of heart disease.

B) “Greatly affect the moods” doesn’t sound great, because we can’t know whether moods would be affected positively or negatively. If it said “negatively,” then this answer would be a weakener, because it would suggest that blood pressure can cause anger problems, thus ruining the logic of the argument. But if it said “positively,” then it would be either irrelevant or a strengthener. We should choose B only if there aren’t any other good answers.

C) People with tranquil personalities are irrelevant. The question is whether anger can cause heart disease. Furthermore, “virtually never” is too amorphous to pick. It’s possible that even angry people “virtually never” get heart disease, and there could still be a causal relationship between anger and heart disease. This is out.

D) This is probably true in real life, but it doesn’t have any effect on the argument one way or the other. Next contestant.

E) Yep. If physiological factors cause both high blood pressure and anger, this would undermine the psychologist's attempted connection of psychological factors and high blood pressure/heart disease.

E is our answer.­