Anxiety, extraversion and smoking

In previous large-scale studies, smoking has been found to be associated either with extraversion or anxiety, though not both. Using a large population of adult American males, anxiety and extraversion scores were examined in groups of never smokers, former light, former heavy, current light and current heavy smokers to test the hypotheses that smokers would be both more extraverted and more anxious than non-smokers. Two independent measures of both traits were used. Heavy current smokers were seen to be significantly higher than non-smokers on both measures of neuroticism or anxiety; there were no differences between groups in extraversion. The small magnitude of reported relations led to the suggestion that future research focus on more meaningful classification of smokers and more specific facets of personality.