News by Subject Social & Behavior

Older people are generally more emotionally stable and better able to resist temptations in their daily lives, a new study says. Researchers from Duke and Vanderbilt pinged 123 study participants aged 20 to 80 on their cell phones three times a day for ten days. They indicated how they felt on a five-point scale for each of eight emotional states, including contentment, enthusiasm, relaxation and sluggishness, and whether they were craving chocolate, cigarettes or sex.

The WSU research team found that rats with regular access to cannabis seek more of the substance and tend to show increased drug-seeking behavior when cannabis is absent.

A new study of 1,365 racially/ethnically diverse, low-income pregnant women found that 4% reported e-cigarette use.

An e-cigarette carried in the left breast shirt pocket of a patient with an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) caused magnetic reversion, interrupting the ICD's ability to detect and treat dangerous heart rhythm problems, clinicians report in HeartRhythm Case Reports, published by Elsevier. The patient was not aware that the e-cigarette has an integrated magnetic component, and it had suspended detection of heart rhythm problems by the ICD four times before he reported it to his healthcare team.

Rates of at-risk alcohol consumption are higher in the South and East of Germany, compared to the North and West, according to a study published in the open-access journal BMC Public Health. However, compared to West Germany, people in East Germany eat more healthily, while rates of smoking and lack of physical activity appear to be similar across regions.

Young people who have tried e-cigarettes but have never smoked before are nearly five times more likely to go on to try smoking, a new study has found. However, the findings do not provide clear support for the claim that e-cigarettes cause young people to start smoking (the so-called possible 'gateway effect').

Misleading portrayals of the safety of tobacco use are widespread on YouTube, where the viewership of popular pro-tobacco videos has soared over the past half-dozen years, according to research by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. In an article in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, researchers found that from 2013-19, different kinds of popular tobacco-themed YouTube videos saw "dramatic increases in views per day, especially for tutorials about vaping products."

Including smoking cessation with existing lung cancer screening efforts would reduce lung cancer mortality by 14% and increase life-years gained by 81% compared with screening alone, according to a study from Rafael Meza from the University of Michigan and colleagues and published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, a publication of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer.

This report describes the kinds of vaping products used by and the clinical characteristics of patients hospitalized in California last year with e-cigarette or vaping-associated lung injury.

University of Arizona Health Sciences study finds when whites and Native Americans in comparable income and education levels are compared, whites consume more cigarettes and are more nicotine dependent. Results published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.