Sensation Seeking and Psychological Reactance as Health Risk Predictors for an Emerging Adult Population

Abstract

Two personality traits, sensation seeking (SS) and psychological reactance (PR), were examined as predictors of health risk behaviors within an emerging adult population. Results using items from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBS) survey developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate both personality traits are predictive of risky substance use behaviors, but only PR was found to be predictive of risky sexual activity. Furthermore, a significant interaction involving PR and sex emerged concerning alcohol use. Results emphasize the importance of considering SS and PR as critical personality variables when designing and evaluating health risk messages and campaigns targeting adolescent and emerging adult populations.

Notes

¹Although exercise and sunscreen use may be only indirectly related to risky behaviors, Quick and Stephenson (2008) presented health messages advocating exercise and sunscreen use varying by level of controlling language (relevant to PR) and vivid language (relevant to SS) but found no interaction between PR and SS across message conditions.

²Previous studies have found various measures of academic achievement to be significant predictors of both substance use and risky sex (Jessor, Turbin, & Acosta, 1998; Newcomb & Felix-Ortiz, 1992).

³Besides marijuana use, we also assessed other drug use, including methamphetamines, cocaine, heroin, and MDMA (ecstasy). However, although the scale produced by combining assessments related to these drugs appeared to be reliable (α = .70), the cases tended to cluster at the lower end of the measure's substantially skewed (skew = 4.27), considerably peaked (kurtosis = 19.18), non-normal distribution. Since its square root transformation provided only a moderate improvement (skew = 3.28, kurtosis = 9.74), the scale was dropped from all analyses.

⁴Although campus location was a significant covariate for risky sex and marijuana use, its inclusion within the models did not alter any of the findings.

⁵Four tests were run; we calculated alpha inflation as: α = 1 – (1 – .012)⁴ = 1 – .9528 = .047 (Grimm, 1993, p. 258). If the initial inclusion of all variables in a block within a test did not provide a significant overall F (analogous to examining the omnibus F before looking at the individual effects in ANOVA), then all the individual predictors were eliminated by the backward method. Thus, the t tests for all significant coefficients within each of the four models were protected from larger model-wise error rates (Kerr, Hall, & Kozub, 2002).

⁶Controlling only for sex, age, grades, and campus, the BSSS-8 predicted the use of alcohol (f ² = .22), tobacco (f ² = .14), marijuana (f ² = .15), and risky sex (f ² =.08), (all β’s p < .001). Likewise, the HPRS predicted the use of alcohol (f ² = .02), tobacco (f ² = .04), marijuana (f ² = .03), and risky sex (f ² =.04) (all β’s p < .001), and it also interacted with age to predict alcohol use (p < .05) (f ² = .01), and marijuana use (p < .01) (f ² = .01).