Do Personality Traits Influence Susceptibility to Addiction?
The personality traits have long been ascertained by various studies to be linked with substance use. Unfortunately, studies that have been done mostly looked into adult populations and research probably much less with the youth.
The researchers found adolescents who may be impulsive, sensation seekers, and low in agreeableness to be at a higher potential risk for addiction. The paper further discusses the findings on this.
Impulsiveness
Impulsivity one among the most widely known personal traits that increase the risk of drug abuse and its problem, as someone impulsive tends to act while thinking through the possible consequences. Engaging in risky activities tends to include drinking and driving on unsafe occasions.
Personality traits are one of the most powerful forces to which we owe reaction in different situations, and they influence our motivations, values, and goals significantly. Some high traces of neuroticism, for instance, would make stressful situations considerably more distressful to navigate, plus deviating control over own actions and behavior.
The studies measure personality characteristics mostly by allowing subjects to rate themselves using adjectives or short phrases (e.g. "I worry a lot"). The research supports the existence of five broad domains, or traits, known as the Big Five, for example, these consist of conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and openness to experience.
Although impulsiveness has been measured in some general population studies, most knowledge available derives from clinical samples or populations (such adolescents) with a high degree of impulsivity. The studies measuring it often apply it as a single-point measure and failure to track participants within time.
High Extraversion
Traits of personality that come with extraversion make people think of drugs as a fine way to chill and blend, giving a temporary sense of belonging and boosting self-regard. This evolves into an addiction cycle that causes need for drugs in the attainment of those same high-happiness and fulfilling states, but gradually one becomes dependent on drugs for assistance in holding this level of emotionality.
Research on personality-drug use relationships has revealed quite a number of associations between personality traits such as neuroticism, openness to experience, and agreeableness with drug use behavior. Within-pair effects showed higher drug-specific influences, for example, prescription medication use was associated with high neuroticism while high extraversion was related to marijuana, cocaine, and stimulant use.
Conscientiousness would also relate toward substance use as this indicates one's degree of organization and accountability, whereby high scores in this attribute would imply more responsibilities and lower substance use. The individual scoring on highest scale of this trait avoids risky situations, and on the whole, lives a responsible life leading to lesser the drug consumption levels.
Low Conscientiousness
However, those who score low on conscientiousness are usually less responsible and also have low self-control, which results in health problems such as poor diets, physical inactivity, and substance drug or alcohol abuse-an especially alarming trend among neurotics because they may rely on drugs and/or alcohol to cope with their own problems.
In researching a large population, it was found that Big Five personality traits were highly predictive of self-reported general health, BMI, and patterns of substance use. Whether the separate trait variables were modeled independently, Extraversion and Conscientiousness emerged the most powerful predictors of drug usage with Agreeableness and Openness showing weaker associations; VIFs celebrated little multicollinearity, while within-pair effects on drug use were louder than between-pair effects suggesting that further modeling needs to be done to correlate correlates to individual drug behaviors.
Healthcare providers may soon have to consider patients in relation to their conscientiousness scores in health assessments. There are numerous short, broad-spectrum, highly reliable personality instruments that can assess individuality (see Figure 2), and many of these have been incorporated into electronic health records systems for even easier transferability across providers.
High Neuroticism
Neurotics experience great anxiety and worry along with usually very critical standards for themselves, often to self-harming extremes.
Sensation-seeking, another trait of personality, is also expected to influence drug use. Such individuals high in sensation-seeking tend to seek new and exciting experiences, be they physical, social or legal, with frequent drug experiments becoming a norm among them.
Conscientiousness indicates an individual's discipline and organization. An individual scoring high on conscientiousness would tend to avoid substance use on the grounds of self-control and welfare and withstand peer pressure from being susceptible to drugs.
Openness to Experience
Those people with high scores on openness to experience are usually intellectually curious, creative and sensitive to aesthetics, and think and act unconventionally. Openness to Experience is correlated with intelligence but this association is moderated by creativity, meaning that openness to experience may be also an index of cognitive flexibility relying on dopamine function in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC).
According to researchers, openness to experience has been the best predictor of hallucinogen use since hallucinogens are said to elicit sensations of openness and awareness.