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Marini, Victoria A.

Psychology

2013

Ph. D.

Juvenile offenders appear to be at particular risk to use cannabis and to experience associated problems because of high rates of cannabis use. Juvenile offenders report smoking cannabis at much higher rates than the general adolescent population, with data from multiple studies indicating that approximately 70% ofadolescents arrested for any crime report using cannabis (Kim & Fendrich, 2002; National Institutes of Justice, 1999). Understanding why juvenile offenders use cannabis, as well as what predisposes a youth to have particular motives for using, may be particularly important for treatment. Indeed, there is a body of literature that highlights the clinical importance of understanding movtivations for cannabis use, especially in terms of treatment (Adesso, Cisler, Lams, & Hayes, 2004; Cooper, 1994; Mitchell, Zvolensky, Marshall, Bonn-Miller, & Vujanovic 2007).
However, given evidence that youth who engage in delinquent and antisocial behavior (ASB) follow different trajectories to ASB based, in part, on emotion regulation abilities (e.g., Frick & Dickens, 2006), it is likely that pathways to cannabis use are also heterogeneous within this population. Thus, the primary aim of this project was to investigate how emotion regulation, assessed by considering emotional reactivity and emotion mangement separately (Thompson, 1994), contributed to coping and enhancement motives. Implications for treatment and future research are discussed.