Social Self-Control Is a Statistically Nonredundant Correlate of Adolescent Substance Use

Abstract

The Social Self-Control Scale (SSCS), which taps provocative behavior in social situations, was compared with five potentially-overlapping measures (i.e., temperament-related impulsivity, psychomotor agitation-related self-control, perceived social competence, and rash action in response to negative and positive affectively-charged states) as correlates of tobacco use and other drug use among a sample of 3,356 9th grade youth in southern California high schools. While there was a lot of shared variance among the measures, the SSCS was incrementally associated with both categories of drug use over and above alternate constructs previously implicated in adolescent drug use. Hence, social self-control (SSC) may relate to adolescent drug use through an etiological pathway unique from other risk constructs. Given that youth who tend to alienate others through provocative social behavior are at risk for multiple drug use, prevention programming to modify low SSC may be warranted.

Feigning Symptoms to Obtain Prescription Stimulants: A Vignette-Based Study on Its Conditions

“…Their tendency to neglect future costs of their behavior may make them downplay the dangers of drug intake and the costs of detected feigning (such as social disapproval). Previous research supports these assumptions by showing that low self-control has been linked to lower educational attainment and less career success (Converse, Piccone, & Tocci, 2014; Hirschi & Gottfredson, 2000) and to a higher likelihood of using prescription stimulants and other prescription drugs nonmedically (Ford & Blumenstein, 2013; Higgins, Mahoney, & Ricketts, 2009; Sussman et al, 2016). Therefore, we propose that: Self-control decreases use (H3a) and feigning willingness (H3b).…”

Antisocial Personality Disorder as a Risk Factor for Opioid Use: The Dual Mediating Roles of Antisocial Attitudes and Self-Control

“…However, there has been little research providing evidence for or against this possibility. Both moral disengagement and self-control are robust predictors of substance use (Basharpoor et al, 2019; Davies et al, 2017; Jang, 2019; Newton et al, 2014; Sussman et al, 2016; Vito et al, 2019), yet there is a dearth of research examining their relative importance for explaining outcomes of interest in the context of ASPD. This is an omission, as reducing the impact of ASPD’s contribution to the opioid crisis may be addressed via programming and that programming may be more well informed by evidence suggesting specific mechanisms are more or less important for understanding opioid use.…”