This prospective study compared the ability of 4 smoking expectancy measures to mediate the influence of peer, parent, and current smoking on adolescents' cigarette use 3 months later. No evidence for mediation was found when expectancies were operationalized as unidimensional subjective expected utility (SEU), multidimensional SEU, or unidimensional SEU decomposed into probability and desirability main effects and their interaction. Evidence for partial mediation was found for the decomposed multidimensional SEU measure. The results suggest that (a) peer and current cigarette use may influence future smoking indirectly through adolescents' probability estimates that smoking will control negative emotions and (b) the relationship between current and future smoking also may be mediated by adolescents' beliefs about the desirability of weight control.

Residents of four northern communities were surveyed about Atomic Energy of Canada Limited's proposal to site an underground repository for high‐level nuclear waste somewhere in the Canadian Shield. Opposition to the repository was relatively strong in all communities, but was strongest among aboriginal respondents. Path analysis revealed that trust in nuclear regulators, faith in science and technology, and anticipated net costs were important mediators of this effect. Aboriginals were less trusting, exhibited less faith in science and technology, and perceived the costs associated with the repository to be higher than their nonaboriginal counterparts. No support was found for the hypothesis that, after controlling for aboriginal status, financially insecure individuals would display greater support for the nuclear waste repository than financially secure individuals. Policy implications for balancing perceived risks and siting needs are discussed.

French and English Canadian adolescents completed a smoking expectancy questionnaire and 2 measures of current smoking status. Multiple regression revealed that beliefs about the expected time of occurrence of smoking outcomes explained unique variance in current smoking after controlling for judgments about the probability and desirability of these outcomes. In addition, the relationship between the perceived probability of the general costs of smoking and current smoking was moderated by beliefs about the expected time of occurrence of these costs. There was no relationship between perceived probability of general costs and smoking for adolescents who expected the costs to occur far in the future, whereas there was a significant negative relationship between these 2 variables for adolescents who expected the costs to occur soon after smoking. The authors' results suggest that it may be possible to increase the concurrent validity of traditional smoking expectancy measures by incorporating expected-time-ofoccurrence judgments.

No abstract