Resisting peer pressure may be more challenging than you think – especially since new research shows that it’s actually hardwired into our brains.

A study by University of Southern California researchers helps explain why people are willing to take stupid chances when friends are watching that they would never take by themselves. Brain scans show that the human brain actually places more value on winning in a social setting than it does on winning when you’re alone.

For the study, the researchers focused on brain activity in the striatum, the part of the brain that is associated with rewards. This section of the brain showed significantly higher activation when study participants beat peers in a lottery, as opposed to when participants won while alone.

The medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain linked to social reasoning, showed more activation in the presence of others as well.

In terms of physical action, the participants who won in social settings were more likely to engage in risky and competitive behaviors in subsequent lotteries.

Evolutionarily, there are strong incentives for winning or being “dominant” over others. Animals in a dominant position have privileged access to resources such as foods or mates.

According to study researcher Georgio Corcicelli, there is also another logical reason why people are more likely to take risks in social settings: while engaging in risky behavior alone can easily be life-threatening, people in groups have a social support network in place to help them if something goes wrong.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Encouraging results from a new study show that simple conversation may reduce marijuana use among teenagers – a finding that may influence anti-drug education in schools, according to researchers.

University of Washington researchers conducted a study in which they visited high school classrooms and gave a short presentation about marijuana myths and facts.  They then offered the students an opportunity to participate in the study.  The students could do so privately, if they desired.

Of the 7100 students who heard about the study, 619 volunteered and 310 reported smoking marijuana regularly.

The participants had two one-on-one meetings with health educators. During the 30-60 minute meetings, the health educators used one of two approaches:

Motivational interviewing, in which the health educator and student discussed the student’s marijuana use and how it might be interfering with the student’s life, goals and personal values, and the health educator told the student about social norms of how much others use the drug.

An educational approach in which a PowerPoint presentation described current marijuana research and health and psychological effects of marijuana use.

The researchers found that participants in the motivational group were more likely to decrease marijuana use faster.  Prior to the study, they had been using marijuana an average of 40 out of 60 days.  Three months after counseling, they had decreased their use by 20 percent (32 days out of 60), and even after a year, they still showed a 15 percent decrease (34 days out of 60).

In comparison, the participants in the education group smoked an average of 38 days out of 60 prior to the study.  After three months, they showed an 8 percent decrease (35 days out of 60) and after a year, they showed an 11 percent decrease (34 days out of 60)

The researchers said that the findings were “encouraging in that apparently meaningful reductions in cannabis use resulting from the brief meetings were sustained over a relatively lengthy period of time.”

According to the researchers, it is important to find novel ways to educate students about marijuana use and decrease drug rates because teenagers  face greater risks from regular marijuana use compared to adults, including developmental delay and decline in school performance as well as increasing the likelihood of other risky behaviors.

“It’s not a risk-free drug,” said Denise Walker, co-director of the University of Washington’s Innovative Programs Research Group. “Lots of people who use it do so without problems. But there are others who use it regularly – almost daily – and want to stop but aren’t sure how.”

According to Walker and her team, “non-finger wagging” approaches seemed to be best in decreasing marijuana use among teenagers.

The study was published in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.

Nobody wakes up one morning and suddenly decides to be a smoker. Smoking is a habit picked up from others who smoke. It’s a social disease. Individuals do it in imitation of somebody they respect who smokes, like parents or teachers, or they do it because their high school or college friends smoke and they want to fit in.

But once you put a cigarette in your mouth, you are exposed (not to mention that you are exposing everyone around you, as well) to the effects of nicotine, which is one of the most highly addictive drugs available today. And the more you smoke, the greater is your urge to smoke, and the more addicted you become.

The smoking habit will wreak havoc throughout the decades of your life because once you start to smoke, its deleterious effects spiral out of control, much like credit card debt. Smoking is associated not only with all kinds of cancer, from oral cancer to cervical cancer, but also with heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in the United States today for both men and women. Since smoking also affects the respiratory system, chronic smokers have a higher incidence of bronchitis (an inflammation of the lining of the tubes that connect the windpipe to the lungs) and emphysema (a chronic lung disease usually caused by exposure to toxic chemicals or tobacco smoke) than those who don’t smoke.

And smoking interferes with the immune system as well; that is, smokers are more prone to getting chronic diseases, flu, and viral illnesses than are nonsmokers.

Then there are the secondary effects that smoking has on others. Pregnant women who smoke have smaller-sized babies and have higher rates of premature babies. And children who are exposed to secondhand smoke have higher levels of asthma.

If you are a smoker, there may be no better thing you can do for your health than to quit smoking, and the best time to quit is as a young adult. You may have started smoking in high school or college, but now you are on your own, away from the peer pressures of your schoolmates and the influence of your parents (who may be smokers themselves), and making a new life for yourself. This is the easiest time to kick the habit.

Of course, quitting is easier said than done. As Mark Twain remarked: “Quitting smoking is easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.”

The reason it’s so difficult to quit is that it’s really a dual challenge, and you are unlikely to succeed in your quest unless you meet both challenges head-on.

The first challenge involves breaking the physical dependency that smoking causes. An absence of nicotine leads to withdrawal symptoms, including anxiety, nervousness, and an overwhelming desire for more nicotine. Very few people can go cold turkey and never pick up another cigarette again. Most people need to be gradually desensitized of their nicotine addiction.

One way to do that is with Nicorette gum or the nicotine patch. These products allow you to alter, over a course of weeks, the amount of nicotine that you ingest, until your body gets used to having no nicotine at all. Acupuncture and hypnosis have also helped people reduce or eliminate the withdrawal symptoms–irritability, depression, and lack of energy–that come from kicking the nicotine habit.

The second challenge for the smoker seeking to quit involves breaking the mental habit that smoking reinforces. The best way to do that is through the same system that got you smoking in the first place, through a peer support system. Just as in overcoming any addiction, breaking the smoking habit requires a support group, which can consist of friends, family, and/or coworkers. But you have to have somebody who is willing to be there for you, to give you the support you need when you are most likely to want to pick up another cigarette.

Quitting should be celebrated at every little step of the way because you’ll be seeing the benefits of your efforts in the minutes, days, weeks months, and years after you quit:

–Twenty minutes after you smoke your last cigarette, your heart rate drops.

–Twelve hours later, the carbon monoxide level in your bloodstream returns to normal.

–Two to three weeks after quitting, your circulation improves, and your lungs begin to function normally.

–One year after you quit, the excess risk of coronary heart disease is half that of a smoker.

–In five years’ time, your risk of stroke is reduced to that of a nonsmoker.

–In ten years’ time, your risk of dying of lung cancer is about half that of a smoker.

–And in 15 years, your risk of coronary heart disease is like that of someone who never smoked.

The long and short of it is, the sooner you quit, the quicker you’ll regain your health.

Your children know the dangers of drugs, alcohol and sex.  You’ve told them all about the risk factors, the negative outcomes, the ruined lives.  They know – they tell you – that those outcomes aren’t something they want for themselves.

And yet, there’s a disparity between what children know, and what they do around friends.

New research may provide an explanation for how this peer pressure works, the New York Times reported.

Temple University researchers used fMRI scans on 40 teenagers and adults to see what differences, if any, there may be in the brain when teens are alone versus when they are with their friends.  The results indicated that peer pressure has a unique effect on teens’ brain signals involving risk and reward, which may explain why teens are more likely to take risks around friends.

The researchers had 14 teens, 14 college students and 12 young adults play a video driving game while in a brain scanner.  In the game, the players needed to  make decisions about stopping at yellow lights or speeding through them and risking a crash.  The incentive was a cash prize at the end, which increased the faster the players finished the course.

Participants played four rounds.  For two rounds, they played alone, and for the other two, researchers told them that two friends who had come with them were watching them play from another room.

When told friends were watching, teens ran about 40 percent more yellow lights and crashed about 60 percent more than when they played alone.

More importantly, the “reward” areas of the brain showed greater activity when playing in front of friends, suggesting that friends’ presence led the brain’s reward system to overpower risk signals.

This effect was not seen in college students and young adults.

“The presence of peers activated the reward circuitry in the brain of adolescents that it didn’t do in the case of adults,” said Laurence Steinberg, an author of the study, a psychology professor at Temple and author of “You and Your Adolescent: The Essential Guide for Ages 10 to 25.” “We think we’ve uncovered one very plausible explanation for why adolescents do a lot of stupid things with their friends that they wouldn’t do when they are by themselves.”

Click here to read more from the New York Times.