Chunk #16 — Substance Misuse in North America — Personality-Targeted Interventions for the Prevention of Alcohol and Illicit Drug Misuse: the Preventure Programme
As outlined above, research on the cognitive and neural characteristics of SS consistently indicates a sensitivity to reward, whereby such individuals demonstrate more disinhibition from incentive reward but might also demonstrate abnormal subcortical (e.g. limbic) activation patterns to reward that would also leave an individual feeling less subjective reward from conditions where reward is less immediate or ambiguous [58]. By contrast, high doses of substances appear to be more stimulating for sensation seekers than for non-sensation seekers. These findings have informed the focus of our SS intervention, in which cognitive behavioural exercises are used to help sensation seekers identify situations in which their tendency to ‘chase the fun’ leads to unwanted consequences for them. Youth are guided in discussing how using substances (used-remove) to cope with the need for stimulation can be problematic. They are then assisted in exploring substance-unrelated strategies for managing their need for stimulation or their tendency to become undercontrolled under highly incentive rewarding situations.
