The Personality of Young Smokers

In a sample of 808 middle-class children more than half of the boys and girls had tried smoking cigarettes by the age of 15 years. These children were found to be particularly extreme on the psychoticism (+), neuroticism (+) and lie scale (-) dimensions of personality, and also somewhat high on the extroversion dimension. This pattern is identical to that of children who misbehave and do not conform in a general sense. The implications for an anti-smoking campaign were briefly discussed.