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Using logistic and multiple regression, we examined the association between hostility, level of depressive symptoms, and smoking in a sample of 1699 ethnically diverse students in California. Self-reports were collected twice from each student, at the beginning of the 6th and 7th grade years. Among 6th graders who had not smoked, depressive symptoms and hostility were associated with smoking initiation by the 7th grade. Among those students who had already tried smoking, increases in depressive symptoms and hostility were associated with more frequent smoking. The association between hostility and smoking was stronger for students reporting higher levels of depressive symptoms.

The cross-cultural use of objective instruments to assess personality and psychopathology has increased markedly in recent times. The most widely used clinical personality inventory in international settings is the Minnesota [...]

Smoking susceptibility is an effective screening technique for identifying high risk adolescents for smoking initiation. Susceptibility remains a significant factor even after the psychological variables such as peer-group norms or accessibility are controlled. Addition of these variables can help in the precise identification of adolescents at increased risk for experimenting with cigarettes from those who have refrained from such experimentation.

Multimodal therapy calls for selection of interventions on the basis of the specific modes of functioning that they are expected to affect. Mode-specificity assumptions were tested in a study of progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) training for type A men with borderline hypertension. It was expected that PMR would be especially effective in reducing psychophysiological reactivity and not effective for hostile cognition or behavioral anger expression. Forty-three subjects were randomly assigned to a control group receiving medical information or to information + PMR. PMR subjects reduced blood pressure reactivity to an anger-instigating role-play more than did controls. Although trait questionnaire measures of hostility and outward anger expression showed no group differences, a think-aloud measure of hostility and an observational measure of anger expression favored PMR. Discussion focuses on alternative explanations for these results, including the possibility that measures failing to show treatment effects were those confounded with negative affectivity.

A smoking cessation program that involves a scheduled smoking procedure implies that scheduled smoking and relapse prevention procedures are more efficient as conditioned measures for smoking withdrawal than are minimal contact control programs. The superiority of the scheduled smoking program is due to its ability to inhibit additional nicotine self-injection that smokers are used to. This procedure eliminates the favorable effects of smoking on mood, concentration and performance, and directs the senses of smokers to alternatives.

A study is conducted among 1699 students in California from varied backgrounds in the sixth and seventh grades to identify the relationship between hostility, intensity of depressive symptoms and smoking. The results show that the relationship between hostility and smoking was more intense among students who indicate intense level of depressive symptoms.

Much research on the etiology of adolescent drug use has focused on posited risk and protective factors at the level of the individual or small group. However, those proximal influences exist within a cultural context that also influences drug use. To prevent drug use in the diverse population of the United States, research is needed on the influence of the cultural context on adolescent drug use, including the effects of immigrating from one cultural or sociodemographic context to another, as well as the effects of living within two different cultural systems simultaneously. Theoretical models and research methods from cultural psychology and cultural sociology are well-suited to examine the cultural context of drug use. We examine causal mechanisms by which acculturation might affect drug use by using two paradigms to conceptualize culture: a stress/coping paradigm and a cultural values paradigm. Implications of cultural risk and protective factors for transdisciplinary research on drug abuse prevention are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]