Public Health Implications of Raising the Minimum Age of Legal Access to Tobacco Products (2015) / Chapter Skim
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3 The Developmental and Environmental Context of Adolescent and Young Adult Tobacco Use
3 The Developmental and Environmental Context of Adolescent and Young Adult Tobacco Use
Pages 63-90
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From page 63... ...
. The newfound focus on this developmental period is due in part to prolonged education, delayed marriage, and delayed parenthood -- events that historically marked adulthood, adult roles, and adult responsibility (Settersten and Ray, 2010)
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From page 64... ...
These factors are reviewed next. Cognitive Development During adolescence, thinking becomes less concrete and more abstract, giving adolescents the ability to consider many components necessary for competent decision making at one time, consider potential positive and negative outcomes associated with each decision, and plan for the future.
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From page 65... ...
. Furthermore, adolescents' emotional immaturity and psychosocial factors influencing their behavior, such as impulsivity and peer pressure, often override the cognitive understanding of a risk.
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From page 66... ...
Psychosocial components relevant to tobacco decision making include social and peer comparison, sensation seeking and impulsivity, peer affiliation, susceptibility to peer pressure, the ability to understand and plan for the future, and perceived social norms.
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From page 67... ...
. However, other critical aspects of psychosocial development, such as those associated with peer pressure, sensation seeking, reward seeking, and impulse control, are much less developed during adolescence than during adulthood (Halpern-Felsher and Cauffman, 2001; Steinberg, 2008; Steinberg et al., 2008, 2009a; Zuckerman, 1979)
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From page 68... ...
Thus, adolescence and young adulthood is a time of low impulse control coupled with high rates of sensation seeking, which results in a greater likelihood that individuals in these development periods will engage in risky behavior. The coupling of low impulse control and high sensation seeking is especially harmful in more emotionally charged situations, in which adolescents are seeking rewards and pleasure yet do not have the ability to control these desires.
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From page 69... ...
found that among college students, friends, and romantic partners, smoking and injunctive norms were predictive of smoking behavior. Peer Affiliation and Susceptibility to Peer Pressure The ability to make rational decisions is mediated by a number of factors and, for adolescents, social factors in particular play a very large role in behavioral decision making.
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From page 70... ...
. Risk taking and sensation seeking can be viewed as part of this drive to experience potential rewards; thus, adolescence is a period in which individuals are particularly likely to initiate behaviors such as smoking (Lydon et al., 2014)
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From page 71... ...
Young adulthood is also an intense time of personal change and growth, which occur as the young adult is less subject to parental and societal restrictions, while simultaneously not being bound by the restrictions and responsibilities that typically characterize adulthood. Given that delay in assuming adult roles and responsibilities, the young adult period is ripe for exploration and experimentation.
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From page 72... ...
However, many areas of psychosocial maturity, including sensation seeking, impulsivity, and future perspective taking continue to develop and change through late adolescence and into young adulthood. Finding 3-3: Adolescence is a period of greatest peer affiliation and susceptibility to peer influence.
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From page 73... ...
Neuroscience research provides insights that show how brain maturation affects the social and emotional development of adolescents and young adults and helps explain why they are more susceptible to using tobacco than are adults. The majority of the recent research on adolescent and young adult brain development has found that both structural and functional changes occur during adolescence, continuing into young adulthood (e.g., Giedd, 2008; Luna et al., 2004)
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From page 74... ...
These receptors connect to the limbic system, which is the part of the brain most responsible for emotions, rewards, and punishment. This increase in dopamine receptors during this period results in an increased desire for rewards and increased sensation seeking in order to feed these desires for reward (Counotte et al., 2011)
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From page 75... ...
. Brain imaging research shows that the prefrontal cortex, which controls self-regulation, impulse control, and sensation seeking, is less mature and less effectively used in adolescents than in adults (Casey et al., 2008; Luna et al., 2010; Smith et al., 2013)
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From page 76... ...
Adolescent brain development is characterized by a dynamic combination of changes, including increased innervations of fibers with modulatory neurotransmitters, synaptic pruning, increased myelination of higher-order associative areas (notably the prefrontal cortex) , and adaptations of various receptor levels (Counotte et al., 2011)
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From page 77... ...
Substantial evidence from these animal studies suggests that the adolescent brain has heightened sensitivity to the reinforcing effects of nicotine compared to the adult brain (Jamner et al., 2003; Slotkin, 2002) , as demonstrated by both conditioned place preference paradigms and self-administration of nicotine (Belluzzi et al., 2004; Chen et al., 2008; Shram et al., 2006; Torres et al., 2008)
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From page 78... ...
Most germane to this report are the following findings: Finding 3-4: Brain development continues until about age 25. Finding 3-5: While the development of some cognitive abilities is achieved by age 16, the parts of the brain most responsible for decision making, impulse control, sensation seeking, future perspective taking, and peer susceptibility and conformity continue to develop and change through young adulthood.
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From page 79... ...
The understanding that adolescent cognitive abilities are largely forged by about age 16 while psychosocial maturation is still continuing has led to the development of new decision-making models that include both cognitive and noncognitive components. These dual-process models are especially relevant to tobacco use, which involves a deliberate decision process in a developmental context strongly affected by psychosocial influences that adolescents are not always equipped to process.
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From page 80... ...
TOBACCO INDUSTRY TARGETING ADOLESCENTS AND YOUNG ADULTS Tobacco industry influence is an important environmental factor that increases adolescents' and young adults' susceptibility to using tobacco use. Tobacco companies have historically targeted children and young adults, recognizing that they needed the "youth market" to perpetuate the sales of their products (Teague, 1973)
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From page 81... ...
found that adolescents' beliefs regarding the attractiveness of advertisements for alcohol and tobacco, how realistic they felt the ads were, and how similar they felt they were to individuals in the ads predicted current use and intentions to use alcohol and tobacco over and above variables of peer and parental influence. As described in previously secret tobacco industry documents, tobacco companies use marketing strategies to shape consumers' and potential consumers' perceptions of risk and to increase beliefs in the acceptability of tobacco products (Anderson, 2011)
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From page 82... ...
. Experimental studies and cross-sectional surveys have found a relationship between exposure to smoking images in the movies and smoking initiation, and longitudinal studies have found that adolescents with higher exposure to smoking in the movies were more likely to initiate smoking than peers who reported low levels of exposure (Dal Cin et al., 2012)
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From page 83... ...
2011. Marketing of menthol cigarettes and consumer perceptions: A review of tobacco industry documents.
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American Journal of Public Health 102(11)
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From page 85... ...
American Journal of Preventive Medicine 46(4)
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2011. Menthol cigarettes and smoking initiation: A tobacco industry perspective.
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2001. Adolescent and young adult substance use: Association with sensation seeking, self esteem and retro spective report of early pubertal onset.
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From page 88... ...
2009a. Perceptions of second-hand smoke risks predict future adolescent smoking initiation.
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From page 89... ...
2008. Age differences in sensation seeking and impulsivity as indexed by behavior and self-report: Evidence for a dual systems model.
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