Personality and Smoking: Individual-Participant Meta-Analysis of 9 Cohort Studies

Christian Hakulinen, Mirka Hintsanen, Marcus R. Munafò, Marianna Virtanen, Mika Kivimäki, G. David Batty and Markus Jokela

No 783, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: Aims: To investigate cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between personality and smoking, and test whether sociodemographic factors modify these associations.Design: Cross-sectional and longitudinal individual-participant meta-analysis. Setting: Nine cohort studies from Australia, Germany, UK and US. Participants: A total of 79,757 men and women (mean age = 51 years). Measurements: Personality traits of the Five-Factor Model (extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience) were used as exposures. Outcomes were current smoking status (current smoker, ex-smoker, and never smoker), smoking initiation, smoking relapse, and smoking cessation. Associations between personality and smoking were modeled using logistic and multinomial logistic regression, and study-specific findings were combined using random-effect meta-analysis. Findings: Current smoking was associated with higher extraversion (odds ratio per 1 standard deviation increase in the score: 1.16; 95% confidence interval: 1.08-1.24), higher neuroticism (1.19; 1.13-1.26), and lower conscientiousness (0.88; 0.83-0.94). Among nonsmokers, smoking initiation during the follow-up period was prospectively predicted by higher extraversion (1.22; 1.04-1.43) and lower conscientiousness (0.80; 0.68-0.93), whereas higher neuroticism (1.16; 1.04-1.30) predicted smoking relapse among ex-smokers. Among smokers, smoking cessation was negatively associated with neuroticism (0.91; 0.87-0.96). Sociodemographic variables did not appear to modify the associations between personality and smoking. Conclusions: Adult smokers have higher extraversion, higher neuroticism and lower conscientiousness personality scores than non-smokers. Initiation into smoking is positively associated with higher extraversion and lower conscientiousness, while relapse to smoking among ex-smokers is association with higher neuroticism.

Keywords: Cohort studies; five-factor mode; individual-participant meta-analysis; personality; smoking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 p.
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.512542.de/diw_sp0783.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp783

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().