Smokers Cigarette smokers, cigar smokers and non-smokers have distinct personality profiles, according to a study published in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Dritjon Gruda of the Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, Portugal, and Jim McCleskey of Western Governors University, USA.
The personality of smokers
Tobacco use remains a formidable global public health challenge, responsible for more than 8 million deaths annually, including those attributed to exposure to secondhand smoke. New research highlights the crucial role of psychological factors, including personality traits, in shaping tobacco use patterns.
To further investigate this issue, Gruda and McCleskey examined the association between the five major personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, sociability, and neuroticism) and cigar or cigarette smoking in a sample of 9,918 older adults from 11 European countries.
The results showed that smoking was associated with lower scores on conscientiousness and agreeableness and higher scores on extraversion compared to non-smokers.
The authors hypothesize that relatively low conscientiousness among smokers may reflect a lack of self-discipline and disregard for long-term health risks, characteristic of more impulsive behaviors, while reduced agreeableness may help explain why smokers often persist despite social disapproval. They also suggest that the higher extraversion observed may suggest that these individuals value the social nature of smoking.
The analysis also highlighted personality differences between different types of smokers, finding that cigar smokers tended to show less neuroticism and greater open-mindedness than both cigarette smokers and nonsmokers, underscoring that the motivations and contexts of tobacco use vary.
These findings suggest that personality traits antecedents smoking behavior, with implications for targeted public health interventions and social policies to combat the global tobacco epidemic.
The authors say future research should explore these relationships in younger cohorts, potentially informing early intervention strategies that prevent smoking initiation based on predisposition to certain personality types. Further studies could also broaden the scope to include other forms of tobacco products such as chewing tobacco or newer smoking trends such as e-cigarettes and vaping.
The authors add: “Basically, what we discovered is: ‘tell me what you smoke and I’ll tell you who you are.’”
E-cigarettes Don’t Help Smokers Stay Away From Cigarettes
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suggested that smokers who are unable to quit smoking may benefit from switching from traditional cigarettes to e-cigarettes, if they make the complete switch and are able to avoid relapsing back to cigarette smoking.
Few studies have been done to test whether smokers can switch to e-cigarettes (battery-powered devices that heat a liquid made up of nicotine, flavorings and other chemicals to create an aerosol that users inhale into their lungs) without relapsing back to cigarette smoking.
Published in the online issue of JAMA Network Open, an analysis from the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science at the University of California, San Diego and UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center reports that e-cigarette use, even daily, does not help smokers quit smoking.
“Our findings suggest that individuals who quit smoking and switched to e-cigarettes or other tobacco products actually increased their risk of relapsing to smoking over the next year by 8.5 percentage points compared to those who quit using all tobacco products,” said lead author John P. Pierce, Ph.D., professor emeritus at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center.
“Quitting is the most important thing a smoker can do to improve their health, but evidence suggests that switching to e-cigarettes made it less likely, not more likely, than continuing not to smoke.”
The researchers used data from the nationally representative longitudinal Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study, conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the FDA Center for Tobacco Products under contract to Westat. The team identified 13,604 smokers between 2013 and 2015, who were followed in two sequential annual surveys to explore changes in use of 12 tobacco products.
At the first annual follow-up, 9.4% of these current smokers had quit. Now considered “former smokers,” 62.9% of these individuals remained tobacco-free, while 37.1% had switched to another form of tobacco use. Of these recent smokers who switched, 22.8% used e-cigarettes, with 17.6% of those who switched using e-cigarettes daily.
Former smokers who recently switched to e-cigarettes were more likely to be non-Hispanic white, have higher incomes, have higher tobacco dependence scores, and view e-cigarettes as less harmful than traditional cigarettes.
Our goal in this study was to evaluate whether former smokers who switched to e-cigarettes or another tobacco product were less likely to relapse to cigarette smoking than those who no longer smoked tobacco,” said lead author Karen Messer, Ph.D., professor and director of the Division of Biostatistics at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health.
At the second annual follow-up, the authors compared former smokers who were tobacco-free with those who had switched to e-cigarettes or other tobacco products. Individuals who had switched to any other form of tobacco use, including e-cigarettes, were more likely to relapse than former smokers who had stopped smoking tobacco completely, by a total of 8.5 percentage points.
Among recent ex-smokers who abstained from all tobacco products, 50% had quit smoking for 12 or more months at the second assessment and were considered to have successfully quit smoking; this compares with 41.5% of recent ex-smokers who switched to any other form of tobacco use, including e-cigarettes.
While those who switched were more likely to relapse, they were also more likely to attempt to quit again and to be smoke-free for at least three months at the second follow-up. Further follow-up research is needed to determine whether this is evidence of a pattern of chronic cessation and relapse in cigarette smoking, or whether it is part of progress toward successful cessation, the researchers said.
“This is the first study to thoroughly examine whether switching to a less harmful nicotine source can be sustained over time without relapsing to cigarette smoking,” Pierce said. “If switching to e-cigarettes were a viable way to quit smoking, then those who switch to e-cigarettes should have much lower rates of relapse to cigarette smoking. We found no evidence of this.”
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