Contrastingly, another found blunted HR responses to psychosocial

stress in adults with a FH of alcoholism as compared to those with a negative FH (Sorocco et al., 2006). Clearly, more research is needed to elucidate this relationship. Furthermore, as almost all of the above-mentioned studies were performed in adults, little is known about the relation between HR and substance use in adolescents. Substance use can be viewed as a manifestation of externalizing problems (e.g., symptoms of oppositional defiant and conduct disorder; Krueger et al., 2002 and Liu et al., 2009). The relation between externalizing problems and HR has been well established; low resting HR is the best-replicated Selleck Enzalutamide correlate of antisocial behavior in children and adolescents,

and Quisinostat purchase attenuated HR in response to a stressor is also well-confirmed (Ortiz and Raine, 2004). Thus, literature on the relation between externalizing problems and HR may provide insight into the relation that could be found between substance use during adolescence and HR reactivity, i.e., low resting HR and attenuated HR response to stress. Of interest here is whether HR is related to externalizing problems in general, or whether it is related specifically to substance use. The goal of this study was to examine the relation between adolescent alcohol and tobacco use and HR (re)activity during a psychosocial stressor. We expected to find that adolescents who drank more alcohol and adolescents who used more tobacco would portray low resting HR and an attenuated HR response to the stressor. By entering number of externalizing problems into the model, we aimed to examine whether any found relation is specific for alcohol and tobacco use. Physiological responses are generally postulated to reflect subjective, or perceived stress (PS), responses (Thayer, 1970), however, convincing experimental evidence of this is limited crotamiton (Oldehinkel et al., 2011). Therefore, a second aim of this study was to examine whether HR and PS were related, and whether alcohol and tobacco use were

related to PS. Based on findings in earlier studies in which HR did but PS responses did not vary by risk group (e.g., Fairchild et al., 2008 and Finn and Pihl, 1987), we hypothesized that HR would be related to PS, but that PS would not be related to alcohol and tobacco use in adolescents. The current sample of 275 14–20-year-old (M = 17.22; SD = 1.31) adolescents is part of a larger sample that participated in the South Holland 2 study, a large Dutch general population study of youth aged 6–20 years. For this larger study, children and adolescents were randomly drawn from registers of 35 representative municipalities in the Dutch province of South Holland including both urban and rural areas. At the second assessment wave, 536 individuals were eligible for the present study on the adolescent group, being between the ages of 14 and 20.