Personal Influences on Addiction

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Personality and Addictive Behaviour

There are three main personality dimensions: introversion-extraversion, neuroticism-stability, and psychoticism. Addicts tend to be more neurotic and higher on the psychoticism scale.

Scales of personality

There are three scales of human personality according to Eysenck and Eysenck (1976).
- Psychoticism (P): this is the tendency for a person to have experienced a psychotic break.
  - People higher on the psychotic scale have personality traits such as egocentrism, aggression and impulsivity.

Scales of personality cont.

Extroversion (E): this is how sociable and outgoing a person is, the opposite being introversion.
- People who are more extroverted tend to have characteristics of being happy, talkative and assertive.
Neuroticism (N): this is how stable a person is.
- More neurotic people tend to have characteristics such as being anxious, irritable and moody.

Addiction

Eysenck suggested that people with certain personality characteristics are more likely to develop addictions.
- For example, if a person exhibits characteristics such as impulsivity or irritability, they are perhaps more likely to abuse substances like alcohol and drugs.

Francis (1996)

A study conducted by Francis (1996) discovered that people with addictions to heroin, alcohol, and nicotine are more likely to have scored high in psychoticism and neuroticism as compared to extraversion.
But the relationship between personality traits and addiction is not clear.
It could be that traits like impulsivity and irritability make you more likely to use substances or make you less able to control the usage of such substances.

Causality

As well, the causality is unclear.
It could be that being addicted to substances causes you to be moodier, more impulsive and irritable.
There does seem to be a clear correlation, but cause-and-effect has not been established.

Self-Efficacy and Addiction

Self-efficacy is part of one's personality and determines how able someone is to change their behaviour - in this case, giving up an addiction.

Self-efficacy

Self-efficacy, as defined by Bandura (1977), is a measure of how well a person believes themselves to be capable of change.
In terms of addiction, a person with higher self-efficacy may believe themselves to be more likely to stop smoking.
A person with low self-efficacy would have strong doubt about whether they could quit.

DiClemente (1981)

A study conducted by DiClemente (1981) found support for this conclusion.
A survey was given to smokers about their level of self-efficacy.
The smokers had recently given up smoking.
Five months after their levels had been measured, they were questioned on whether or not they had abstained from smoking.

Findings

It was determined that the higher they had scored on the self-efficacy scale, the more likely they were to abstain from smoking.
Those that showed lower self-efficacy were more likely to have returned to smoking.