Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Addictive Behaviors journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/addictbeh Personality and prescription drug use/misuse among first year undergraduates Chinneck A. a, ⁎ , Thompson K. b , Mahu I.T. a , Davis-MacNevin P. a , Dobson K. c , Stewart S.H. a,d a Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, 1355 Oxford Street, Halifax, NS B3H 4R2, Canada b Department of Psychology, St. Francis Xavier University, 2323 Notre Dame Avenue, Antigonish, NS B3G 2W5, Canada c Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive N.W., Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada d Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University, 5909 Veteran's Memorial Lane, Halifax, NS B3H 2E2, Canada HIGHLIGHTS • Any use: AS to sedatives/tranquilizers, HOP painkillers, SS stimulants, and IMP all. • Purely appropriate use: AS to sedatives/tranquilizers; HOP to painkillers. • Misuse: SS to stimulants; IMP to unconstrained misuse. ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Undergraduate students Personality vulnerability Prescription drug use Medically-sanctioned prescription drug use Prescription drug misuse ABSTRACT Emerging adults (18–25 year olds) endorse the highest rates of prescription drug misuse. Attending college or university may confer additional risk. Previous research suggests that personality is an important predictor of many addictive behaviours. Four traits have been consistently implicated: anxiety sensitivity, hopelessness, sensation seeking, and impulsivity. Published studies on personality as a predictor of prescription drug abuse are limited, however, by a primary focus on overall prescription drug use, inconsistent operationalisation of misuse, and failure to control for alcohol use. Sample sizes have been small and non-specific. We sought to better understand how personality predicted the overall use, the medically-sanctioned use, and the misuse of pre- scription sedatives/tranquilizers, opioids, and stimulants. A large (N = 1755) sample of first year Canadian undergraduate students (mean age = 18.6 years; 68.9% female) was used. We predicted that: anxiety sensitivity would be related to sedatives/tranquilizers, hopelessness to opioids, sensation seeking to stimulants, and im- pulsivity to all three. Save for the impulsivity to opioid use path, predictions were fully supported in our “any use” model. For medically-sanctioned use: anxiety sensitivity predicted sedative/tranquilizers, hopelessness predicted opioids, and impulsivity predicted stimulants. For misuse: anxiety sensitivity (marginally) predicted sedatives/tranquilizers, sensation seeking predicted stimulants, and impulsivity predicted all three. Our models support using personality-matched interventions. Specifically, results suggest targeting anxiety sensitivity for sedative/tranquilizer misuse, sensation seeking for stimulant misuse, and impulsivity for unconstrained pre- scription drug misuse. Interventions with early coping skills that pertain to all four traits might be useful for preventing prescription drug uptake and later misuse. 1. Introduction Prescription drugs (PDs) are misused when they are taken without a physician's prescription, in greater amounts or more often than pre- scribed, via non-intended routes, for non-prescribed reasons, and/or with contraindicated substances (Haydon, Monga, Rehm, Adlah, & Fischer, 2006). Physiological harms of PD misuse include increased risk of negative drug interactions, withdrawal, physical dependence, injury related to intranasal use, organ damage, cardiovascular risk, accidental overdose, and death (Hartung et al., 2013; Holloway, Bennett, Parry, & Gorden, 2014; Teter, Falone, Cranford, Boyd, & McCabe, 2010). Psy- chological harms include psychological dependence, distress, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2018.07.001 Received 25 March 2018; Received in revised form 7 June 2018; Accepted 2 July 2018 Abbreviations: PD, Prescription drug; AS, Anxiety sensitivity; HOP, Hopelessness; SS, Sensation Seeking; IMP, Impulsivity ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: annie.Chinneck@dal.ca (A. Chinneck), Kdthomps@stfx.ca (K. Thompson), Ioan.Tiberiu.Mahu@dal.ca (I.T. Mahu), Pdmacnev@dal.ca (P. Davis-MacNevin), Ksdobson@ucalgary.ca (K. Dobson), Sstewart@dal.ca (S.H. Stewart). Addictive Behaviors 87 (2018) 122–130 Available online 04 July 2018 0306-4603/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T