- Exposure to novel stimulus environments decreased amphetamine self-administration in rats (Klebaur et al., 2001), suggesting that novelty may substitute for stimulant reward, especially among high sensation seekers at risk for substance abuse.
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- We found that both the developmental patterns and outcomes associated with marijuana use are different for African American and Caucasian adolescents. Early-onset Caucasian and mid-onset African American adolescents experienced the greatest number of negative outcomes later in life associated with their marijuana use, suggesting that groups to target for intervention may vary by race (Brown et al., 2004).
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- In humans, high sensation seekers showed stronger function magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses to emotionally arousing stimuli in brain regions associated with arousal and reinforcement (right insula, posterior medial orbitofrontal) compared to low sensation seekers (Joseph et al., 2008), suggesting that high sensation seekers have an overactive approach system.
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- The biologically-based experience-seeking component of sensation seeking is positively associated with structural volume in the right anterior hippocampus, a region associated with the assessment of novelty in neuroimaging studies (Martin et al, 2007).
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- During repeated visual exposure, cortical evoked potential responses were correlated with sensation seeking status (Jiang et al., 2007), suggesting possible biomarkers that can be used for development and evaluation of prevention strategies among vulnerable individuals
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- Using a hierarchical multiple regression analysis from a large sample of rats, individual differences in novelty seeking predicted the rate of amphetamine self-administration (Cain et al., 2005).
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- Similar to the individual differences observed in rats, amphetamine produced greater magnitude of effects on psychomotor performance and subjective reports of drug effect in high sensation seeking human subjects (Kelly et al., 2006), and self-administer greater amounts of drug (Stoops et al., 2007). High sensation seekers were also more sensitive to both the reinforcing and to the performance-impairing effects of alcohol, diazepam, and nicotine, suggesting an increased vulnerability to a variety of drugs.
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- Using a two-community cross-over design involving two mid-sized cities (Lexington and Knoxville), a time series analysis demonstrated the effectiveness of using a televised anti-drug PSA campaign targeted specifically at influencing the trajectory of marijuana use among high sensation seeking individuals (Palmgreen et al., 2001).
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- In a 10 year follow-up of youth first studied in the 6th grade (now young adults), data revealed that there are no long-term positive effects of participation in DARE, i.e., no sleeper effects were operating (Lynam et al., 1999).
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- A longitudinal study of adolescent drug and alcohol use showed that the effect of sensation seeking on drug and alcohol use can be explained in part by the tendency for high sensation seekers to affiliate with other high sensation seekers who expose them to high sensation-value activities such as drug and alcohol use (Donohew et al., 1999).
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- Contrary to the claim offered by Shedler and Block (1990), we found that those who abstained from alcohol and drugs were not more psychologically impaired than those who experimented with drugs. Frequent users of marijuana were consistently more impaired than both the abstainers and the experimenters, and classification according to marijuana use was more related to psychopathology than was classification according to alcohol use (Milich et al., 2000).
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