Negation and Focus in Man - Machine Communication

Abstract

The general objective of this work was to identify within the smoking population different types of smoking behavior and to determine the multiple pharmacological and psychosocial factors (and their interaction) which could determine these categories of behavior. Our first step was to construct a valid instrument consisting of a questionnaire (self-administered) with the goal to measure the different types of smoking behavior. The second step relevant to the multifactorial approach is actually in progress. Its objective is to determine the relation between the pharmacological and psychosocial factors that could explain the inter-individual differences for smoking behavior. In this paper we present the data obtained from the first step of our research. Our population is composed of 113 smokers of the age of 21 to 40 years to whom we presented a questionnaire "Types of Smoking Behavior" constructed during a preceding step. The data were submitted to different factorial analysis. Thus, a Principal Component Analysis gave us a general factor of smoking behavior or bipolar axis of high/low tobacco use (21.4% VT). The factorial analysis with varimax rotation confirmed the existence of 5 types of smoking behavior. These are "dependence" factor (29.1% VT), "regulation of negative affectivity "factor (11.2% VT), "increase of positive affect" factor (9.3% VT), "stimulation" factor (7.6% VT) and "social integration" factor (6.7% VT). These results allowed us to construct a valid questionnaire of 20 items measuring 5 types of smoking behavior.