Il comportamento di fumo nei giovani adulti: fattori psicologici, motivazionali e contestuali nella individuazione di diverse tipologie di fumatori

The World Health Organization (WHO, 2015) considers tobacco consumption as one of the major health threats which kills 6 million individuals every year. For the purpose of prevention, it is important to better understand how to stop the tobacco epidemic especially among young people. The first part of the present dissertation presents the tobacco epidemiology, an overview of psychological research on tobacco addiction, and a review of the main behavioral change theories concerning the adoption of healthy behaviors. The second part of the dissertation presents four studies conducted within this PhD project which aims at deepen the knowledge of smoking behavior among young people. Studies 1 and 2 show how motives behind tobacco use allow to identify different typologies of smokers. Study 1 highlights the good psychometric properties of a recent scale that measures 11 smoking motives (B-WISDM; Smith et al., 2010) on which five motivational profiles have been identified. The profiles are further classified in two macro-categories: social smokers, who show a higher level of secondary extrinsic motives than primary motives, and highly motivated smokers, for whom the levels of the different motives are similar. Adopting a longitudinal design with two follow-up assessments (at 3 and 9 months from the baseline), Study 2 validates the results of the previous study, exactly replicating three out of five profiles, showing their strong temporal stability, and highlighting the same macro-categories previously found. Tobacco consumption, dependence level, and social-cognitive factors that predicts behavioral change are different among the profiles and these differences are consistent across the two studies and in line with the literature. Study 3 shows that the development of an intention to quit smoking is influenced by the Big Five personality profile as well as by the social-cognitive factors theorized by the Health Action Process Approach (Schwazer, 1992, 2008). Generally speaking, the more adaptive the profile is, the higher the intention level. Furthermore, the effect of risk perception on intention is positive for all the profiles except for the less adaptive ones. Adopting an experience sampling method, Study 4 points out the interactive effect of emotional state, social context, and activity type on the craving for smoking. Among factory-made cigarette smokers, as the positive emotions increase the craving decreases, regardless from social context and activity type. A similar relationship is observed for handmade cigarette smokers too, except during social interactions in which craving and positive emotions are positively related. The knowledge originated from these studies could be useful in identifying important factors and strategies on which develop personalized and more effective interventions to help people stop smoking.