Adolescent Drinking: Psychosocial Processes of Risk and Protection

by National Institute of Health

Psychosocial research on adolescent drinking includes studies of personality and the impact of particular personality traits on drinking risk, expectancies (that is, the effects someone expects after drinking alcohol), and cognitive development. Although studies involving adolescents have not identified specific sets of personality traits that uniquely predict alcohol use, some traits have been shown to be associated with heavy alcohol use and alcohol use disorders. These traits include disinhibition or poor self-regulation, impulsiveness and aggression, novelty-seeking, and negative affectivity. Externalizing behaviors in childhood and early adolescence have been found to predict alcohol use disorders in early adulthood, as have certain internalizing behaviors. This article examines the theories and psychosocial processes thought to underlie underage drinking.

The interactions among alcohol-related genes, biological development, and environment play out in the psychological processes underlying adolescent decisions to drink or to abstain from drinking. Psychosocial research on adolescent drinking encompasses studies of personality and the impact of particular personality traits on drinking risk, expectancies (the effects someone expects from drinking alcohol), and cognitive development.

As is true for adults, studies involving adolescents have repeatedly failed to find specific sets of personality traits that uniquely predict alcohol use. In addition, adolescence is a period of change, and personality is not as stable as it will be in adulthood. Nonetheless, some personality traits have been shown to be associated with heavy alcohol use and alcohol use disorders in adolescents. These traits include disinhibition or poor self-regulation, impulsiveness and aggression, and novelty-seeking. Longitudinal studies have found that externalizing behaviors in childhood and early adolescence predict alcohol use disorders in early adulthood.

Negative emotionality - depression and anxiety - also have been found to predict alcohol problems. Adolescents in this case may use drinking as a coping strategy.

Expectancies about the effects of alcohol are measurable in children before they ever begin to drink. Alcohol-related expectancies influence how early a child will begin to drink and how much she or he will drink at that point. Research suggests that people who have expectancies of more positive experiences from drinking tend to drink more than others and are at highest risk for excessive drinking. Research is looking into the neural processes underlying expectancies and exactly how they drive behavior.

An almost universal theme whenever adolescent drinking is addressed relates to how adolescents think and make decisions about the world around them. Despite much literature suggesting that adolescents have not yet reached full maturity in their cognitive processing, when called upon to make reasoned decisions using abstract processes, they generally do as well as adults. Differences in decisionmaking appear between adults and adolescents in situations that may have social or emotional overtones. Like adults, adolescents may vary their judgments based on social context, but the contexts that encourage such decisionmaking differ for adults and adolescents.

With this in mind, adolescent thinking and decisionmaking may be best understood as fully developed for the purpose for which they evolved: to deal with the tremendous transitions that humans face at this stage of life. The goal for research is how to integrate this emerging understanding of adolescence with the need to reduce adverse outcomes.

Many factors play a part in the development of adolescent drinking. Comprehensive theories on the development of adolescent drinking create a framework for understanding and testing ideas about how multiple factors interact to lead to problems with alcohol. One of the goals of NIAAA's underage drinking initiative is to stimulate the synthesis and testing of new and comprehensive models for adolescent drinking within a developmental framework.

Personality and Alcohol Problems in Youth

Although the relationship between personality and alcohol use disorders has been extensively studied in older adolescents and adults, far less research has been conducted with respect to personality and alcohol involvement earlier in adolescence. Indeed, personality in adolescence in general is much less developed as a research area than it is in adults. This is probably due in part to the tendency among researchers interested in individual differences in infancy and childhood to focus on temperamental traits that are thought to represent very basic tendencies in a person's response to the environment. These temperamental traits are highly heritable and are usually assessed by parents or other adults. In contrast, researchers focusing on adults tend to look at more complex traits obtained through self-reports. Thus, the period of adolescence (especially early adolescence) sits at the junction of research traditions on childhood temperament and adult personality, which may be why this age has not received a greater amount of attention and development.

Numerous personality traits have been described in the literature, but research suggests that most of these can be subsumed by a handful of higher order traits. Researchers disagree on the number of these higher order traits, but current influential models are usually defined as either "Big Three" or "Big Five". Big Three approaches typically describe their factors as representing: 1. negative emotionality or neuroticism, 2. positive emotionality or sociability or extraversion, and 3. impulsivity or behavioral undercontrol or (lack of) constraint. Both negative emotionality/neuroticism and positive emotionality/sociability/extraversion have their counterparts in Big Five approaches, but impulsivity or behavioral undercontrol or (lack of) constraint appears primarily to be reflected in the Big Five trait of (or lack of) conscientiousness as well as in the Big Five traits of (low) agreeableness and neuroticism. In addition, a higher order trait referring to either "openness to experience" or "intellect" (depending upon the personality system) also emerges. Research in older adolescents and adults strongly suggests that traits related to behavioral undercontrol are the most strongly associated with both alcohol use and alcohol use disorders, whereas traits associated with negative emotionality are somewhat less important. Existing research suggests that these basic findings generalize to younger adolescents, but the evidence base at present is somewhat underdeveloped.

About the Author

NIH is the nation's medical research agency - making important medical discoveries that improve health and save lives. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research.