For this final paper project I choose a very interesting topic known as a Substance-Related Disorders. In one word for some people using alcohol, smoking cigarettes or other drugs is apparently a harmless pleasure. For others it is extremely destructive for their health. The main point why I choose this topic is my own addiction to cigarettes. For long time I have tried a lots of different things to quit this nasty habit, but nothing worked for me so far. I think of cigarettes as a type of drug along with heroin and cocaine that we people develop addiction to.
I do have one question is what really causes any drug use to develop into an overwhelming addiction that dominates your life in any possible way. I believe that everyone wants to be in control over its own life, but when you are addicted to a drug you last that control. According to our text book addiction is defined as a difficult or impossible to quit habit. (Introduction to Psychology, James W. Kalat. 6 th edition.
2002).
What makes a Substance Addictive? What really makes them to be that addictive to us? Are they become automatic habit to us, and what drives us to buy them again if we want to quit?
As it discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 in our text book, any drug dependence includes tolerance one way or the other. As you should know that cigarette smoking addiction based on nicotine consumption. The more we smoke the more we put ourselves under the risk to get addicted to it. Nearly all types of drugs commonly produce addictions stimulate dopamine receptors. These receptors are called as” pleasure receptors” some psychologist call them as “painful stimuli” (Young, Joseph, Gray, 1993).
I always wanted to know if smoking could become automatic habit that we carry with us through out live? On the other hand, maybe stress that we experience every day has to do with smoking too? To help me go deeper into these issues I had conducted some research in Journal of Abnormal Psychology volume 110 number 1 and. I have found two very interesting articles that include studies regard these issues. My article was written by three famous psychologists whose names are Orlando, Ellickson, and Jinnett. This article is called “The Temporal Relationship between and Cigarette smoking during Adolescence and Young Adulthood.” There have been a numerous studies conducted that state the existence of a relationship between our tobacco use and the emotional stress among adolescents and young adults. “Emotional distress as a risk factor for smoking at early stages of smoking, an interpretation that I supported by the differential effect of emotional distress on smoking between boys and girls in their 10-12 grade (Chass in et al. , 2000) .” In the study conducted by Orlando, Ellickson, and Jinnett they used three level hypotheses regarding these studies.
First is Emotional distress that leads to tobacco use, second tobacco use hands to emotional distress, and third the presence of these two factors combined. There are some believers among smokers that they smoke to improve their mood. In this study they include 30 middle or junior schools from California and Oregon. This study lasted 10 years from 1985 and it ended in 1995. Two thousand participants were involved in this study within these ten years. Measurements were done in three different ways.
The number of days they smoked in the past month. Measurements of emotion distress by the RAND a multiyear panel study originally conducted to evaluate use of drugs in high-schools. The results were very interesting. Overall smoking measured between 10 th and 12 th grades.
The results were slightly different only by gender. Girls exhibit significantly higher rates of emotional distress than boys. Girls tended to be less rebellious than boys. At the end of this research they found that emotional distress leads to increased tobacco use, especially among 12 th graders whose emotional distress at the higher levels.
At the end of research results implied that emotional distress is a risk factor for smoking at the early stages of smoking. At the same time, smoking does not have as impact after smoking behavior has began to stabilize.
In regards my second question if the smoking automatic or not I have used an article written by Bruce W. Baxter and Riley E.
Hinson, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2001. In this article written by Professor Bruce W. Baxter from University of Western Ontario he was trying to investigate drug use behavior. His attempt to understand drug use behavior was a test that he performed at his university. The whole point of this task was to have smokers do a RT test under four different stages. The stages are while smoking, sitting next to smoker, simply holding a cigarette, and not smoking.
This RT was focused on the psycho pharmacological properties of drugs that motivate people to go and consume them as they needed. As I was going through this interesting material I found a line in the text that really leaves a big question mark after you read it. This is it”-Although research addressing the motivational incentives associated with drug consumption has greatly increased, but it is unclear whether the majority of drug use behavior involves making a decision to consume. Instead, it has been proposed that the process of addiction can be attributed in part to the auto immunization of behavior.”
This model suggests that behavior becomes automatic. It is also called a “schema” action. To put this simply, once the action schema has been performed then intentional resources are no longer required to guide our behavior.
Typing, Driving, Playing piano and Smoking required a little attention from us at the beginner stage where everything we do is for the first time, but if we do spend our time to practice those things, it can be performed with very little or no use of attention at all.
In conclusion, these all resources had very interesting information regards to this smoking behavior which appears to be a part of Substance-Related Disorders. This whole study makes me realize that I am one of those people who got affected by this drug called smoking addiction.