BHSU research links impulsivity, health risk

By Jill Broecher, Journal correspondent | Sunday, January 20, 2008

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SPEARFISH -- A few weeks into the new year, many have already given up their resolutions to stop smoking, drinking or gambling. Does having the same goal and the same result year after year mean these people are lacking in self-control, or something else? A research study by Black Hills State University assistant professor of psychology Scott Stoltenberg suggests impulsivity may be to blame for such health-risk behaviors.

Stoltenberg, with the help of his students Bryan Batien and Denis Birgenheir, decided to investigate the relationships among gender, impulsiveness and a person's chance for engaging in health-risk behaviors such as smoking, drinking and gambling.

"Perhaps if you can better understand the relationship between impulsivity and engaging in risky health behaviors, you can use it as a way to screen people and have some sort of prevention," Stoltenberg said.

They recruited 200 people, mostly BHSU students, to participate as test subjects in the research project. These subjects completed an extensive questionnaire asking about impulsiveness, provided a DNA sample and performed two computer tasks. One was the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, a direct measure of impulsivity, and the other was the Stop Signal Reaction Time, a measure of response inhibition (how quickly a person can stop a task).

The results revealed that impulsivity is related to a person's risk for drinking problems, and more so in men than women. In fact, lower levels of a certain type of impulsiveness -- motor impulsivity, which has to do with acting on the spur of the moment -- were associated with greater risk for alcohol problems. This result seems to contradict what the research team expected to see. However, they predict drinking may be a coping motive for people who are able to exert a lot of self control.

This is not the first time Stoltenberg, who received his doctorate in psychology from the University of Illinois, has performed this kind of research. Before coming to BHSU in 2004, he routinely conducted research at the University of Michigan. This impulsivity study, published recently in the international scientific journal Addictive Behaviors, is Stoltenberg's 20th study to be published.

However, for the students who helped conduct the study and the subjects in the study, this project was a new and exciting experience.

"In general, this study allowed students to see that we have some interesting research going on here at BHSU," Stoltenberg said. "Also, for the people that are on my research team, it provides them a great experience to see what it's like to be involved in research experiments and increase their chances of getting into graduate school."

Stoltenberg has already begun planning for the next research project his students can take part in. It is an extension of the previous experiment. Over the next three years, he will collect information from 500 subjects about risky behaviors along with cheek cells for genetic analysis.

"I am trying to build a knowledge base for impulsive behaviors and health-risk behaviors that hopefully can lead to treatments for people with behavioral disorders," Stoltenberg said. "That is a real long-term goal for all these kinds of studies."

Those interested in learning more about Stoltenberg's studies can visit his Web site at www.bhsu.edu/sstoltenberg/.