Personality environmental predictors of alcohol dependence in adolescents and college students

Abstract

Research has found increasing rates of alcohol dependence amongst adolescents and college students. In this paper, adolescents and college students are defined as schooling individuals who have not entered the workforce. They include high school and college students aged between 13 to 24 years old. This review paper aims to provide an overview of alcohol dependence, drinking motives that include coping, enhancement and social motives, as well as to explore the personality and environmental predictors of alcohol dependence amongst adolescents and college students. The personality predictors explored include: The Big Five Inventory (BFI), disinhibition and delayed reward discounting. It is found that neuroticism, conscientiousness and disinhibition are significantly associated with alcohol dependence; research on agreeableness and delayed reward discounting produced

mixed findings, and lastly, research found no relation between openness to experience and extraversion with alcohol dependence in adolescents and college students. The environmental predictors explored include: parental alcoholism, parenting styles, fraternity and sorority membership and culture. All these factors are significantly associated with adolescent alcohol dependence. The validity of personality-environmental interaction effect leading to adolescent alcohol dependence is examined, concluded by future directions and implications.

Keywords: adolescents, predictors, alcohol dependence, alcoholism, personality, environment, and personality-environmental interaction