Subjective culturer, smoking, alcohol and the Internet dependence

Cross cultural, ethnographic, anthropological studies, as well as research in the field of developmental and cultural psychopathology, give evidence in support of the idea that “context” (interpersonal environment, conventional social structures, social norms, socio-economic variables, cultural factors) plays a main role in defining which expression of distress is accepted or sanctioned (Draguns, 1995; Gone & Kirmayer, 2010). Different studies show how acculturation plays an important role in the initiation and maintenance of a number of mental illnesses (Oei & Raylu, 2009). According to the cultural standpoint, our work focuses on the role of the subjects’ cultures in many types of problematic repetitive behaviors, like smoking, alcohol and internet addictions. The term “subjective culture” can be originally found in Triandis (1972, 2002). According to the author, subjective culture includes ideas about how to live properly and how to behave in relation to objects and people. However, whereas for the author subjective culture is a “characteristic way of perceiving its social environment" by society (Triandis, 1972, p. viii, 3), we recognize that many subjective cultures may be expressed within the same society (Venuleo, Salvatore, & Mossi, 2014; Venuleo, Mossi, & Salvatore, 2014; Venuleo & Marinaci, forthcoming). Previous studies in the Italian context have already provided evidence that subjective cultures, through which people interpret their social environment, play a major role in differentiating heavy drinkers, as well as pathological gamblers, compared with a control group (Venuleo, Salvatore, & Mossi, 2014). The current study assessed whether smoking dependent subjects express different subjective cultures compared with alcohol dependent subjects and internet dependent subjects. Our hypothesis is that subjective cultures also play a role in differentiating various kinds of addiction, having different implications for individuals’ social adapting, Participants, recruited in three different contexts (public health services for the treatment of addiction, casino, undergraduate course) were subjected to the Cigarette Dependence Scale (CDS) (J-F. Etter, J. Le Houezec & T. V. Perneger 2003), the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) (World Health Organization 1993), the Internet Addiction Test (IAT) (K. Young 1998), and the Questionnaire on the Interpretation of the Social Environment (QUISE) (Mossi & Salvatore 2011), in order to investigate the subjective cultures. Two different logistic regressions were applied in order to esteem the capability of the QUISE scores to differentiate smoking dependent subjects from alcohol dependent subjects and internet dependent subjects. Consistent with the hypothesis, the results show that smoking dependent subjects express a different way of connoting the social environment, when compared with alcohol dependent and internet dependent subjects. The former depict the environment as positive and reliable, while the the latter depict it as negative and unreliable. Implications for prevention and intervention efforts are discussed.