Designing Prevention Programs for Sensation Seeking Adolescents

In their ancient past, humans learned to engage in the sometimes risky behavior of investigating novel objects in their environments, such as those that were possibly threatening or those which offered new sources of food or other reward, presumably as a means of survival. We call the propensity to seek out novelty, sensation seeking. Today, an emerging body of research from both the biological and behavioral sciences suggests that understanding differences among adolescents in their propensity to seek out novel sensations offers a path to greater understanding of much drug use -particularly among adolescents -and clues on how to reach many of those most at risk for drug abuse with more effective prevention programs. This research draws on a long line of work by Marvin Zuckerman on sensation seeking, which he defines as a trait involving “the seeking of varied, novel, complex, and intense sensations and experiences, and the willingness to take physical, social, legal, and financial risks for the sake of such experience”(p. 27). Individuals at highest risk tend to be those who are most likely to be novelty seekers or sensation seekers and it is these individuals who are the principal targets of some recent tests of a different kind of intervention program. This program is aimed at the highest seekers of novelty and does not assume that all individuals will engage in a decision-making process that is “rational.” In this chapter we bring together two complementary lines of research. One line of research is the result of studies conducted on laboratory animals. The second line of research was conducted on humans who were volunteer subjects in a variety of social science experiments. The value of combining these two kinds of research is that we can learn different things from studies conducted on laboratory animals and humans. Putting what we have learned from both types of studies together provides a wealth of information that has given us key insights into how programs can be more effective at accomplishing the goal of drug prevention. This chapter describes some of the background for drug abuse interventions. It draws upon this body of convergent research from a wide range of disciplines and some of the ways it has been employed.