Personality traits and marijuana outcomes: The mediational role of motives across four countries

MEZQUITA, LAURA; BRAVO, ADRIAN J.; PILATTI, ANGELINA; M I IBAÑEZ; CROSS-CULTURAL ADDICTIONS STUDY TEAM

Jornada; IX Jornadas de la Asociación Iberoamericana para la Investigación de las Diferencias Individuales.; 2020

Previous studies have shown that low agreeableness, low conscientiousness, and high openness are positively related to marijuana use, while low emotional stability, low agreeableness, and low conscientiousness are associated with more marijuana-related negative consequences. Marijuana motives (i.e., reasons to use marijuana) are also relevant factors linked with marijuana use and misuse. Previous meta-analyses have found significant associations between coping, conformity, expansion and enhancement motives with frequency of marijuana use and/or marijuana-related problems. However, the joint influence of both personality traits and motives are scarce. The aim of the present study was to test the mediational role of marijuana motives in the association of personality traits with frequency of marijuana use and marijuana-related negative consequences in four countries. From the 3482 undergraduates from USA, Argentina, the Netherlands and Spain that participated in the survey, we selected 1175 students who reported consuming marijuana at least once in the last 30 days, and completed measures of personality, marijuana motives, and marijuana outcomes.Structural equation models and multi-group analysis were performed to explore the associations among the studied variables and the invariance of the models across countries, respectively. The strongest associations were found between emotional stability and coping motives (β=-.217, p