Risk Factors - Personality Flashcards
What is personality?
Refers to the stable traits of a person that underline consistencies in the way they behave over time and in different situations.
What did Krueger find? (1998)
Identified a number of personality traits (e.g. sensation seeking and impulsivity) that are commonly associated with addiction.
What is the addiction-prone personality?
Barnes (2000) developed the APP scale as a way of assessing the influence of personality factors on addictive behaviour.
Barnes (2005) found that personality was a significant predictor of ‘heavy’ marijuana use.
Studies using the APP scale have shown that personality differences can discriminate drug addicts from non-addicts.
What is addiction and personality disorders?
Verheul (1995) found that the overall prevalence of personality disorders was 44% in alcoholics, 70% for cocaine addicts.
This suggests there is a relationship between addiction and personality disorders such as anti-social personality disorder and borderline personality disorder.
What are the evaluative points?
Support for the role of impulsivity
Implications of an addictive-prone personality
What is meant by support for the role of impulsivity?
Research support for the influence of impulsivity in predicting later substance use and addiction comes from longitudinal studies.
Labouvie and McGee (1986) found that adolescents who progressed to heavier levels of alcohol abuse tended to score higher on scores of impulsivity.
Blonigen (2011) have gone further in highlighting the impact of impulsivity. They found that alcohol-prone individuals who scored higher on impulsivity had a greater morality risk than individuals scoring low on impulsivity.
This is explained by the fact that impulsivity is linked to a wide range of health-risk behaviours beyond excessive alcohol use, in particular illicit drug use.
What is meant by implications of an addiction-prone personality?
Empirical evidence supports the claim that there is a relationship between certain personality characteristics and addictive behaviours.
For example, research has shown that personality is a key predictor in the initiation of substance use, the development of substance abuse and the maintenance of substance dependence (Barnes, 2000).
An implication of this research finding is that, by identifying vulnerable individuals in advance (e.g. people most likely to become alcoholics), help could be given to stop their behaviour developing into an addiction.
This could potentially prevent the development of substance disorders, reducing the enormous personal costs to those individuals and the costs to society in the treatment of their addictions
