Alcohol Misuse: Integrating Personality Traits and Decision-Making Styles for Profiling

Abstract

The literature has described how different and independent personality profiles (pathways or motives) lead to the same outcome: alcohol misuse. In addition, decision-making styles could also play a role in understanding alcohol misuse better, although the evidence is much more scarce compared to personality traits. The present paper aims to test how personality traits and decision-making styles could be integrated to better understand different pathways/profiles of alcohol misuse. Measures of alcohol misuse (AUDIT and RAPI), structural personality models (ZKA-PQ/SF), impulsivity (BIS-11 and UPPS-P), and decision-making styles (GDMS) were applied to a sample of 988 individuals from the Spanish general population (446 of them also completed the NEO-PI-R). Exploratory factor analyses support the identification of different pathways to alcohol misuse, and regression analyses suggest that decision-making styles add little variance to personality traits to account for differences in alcohol misuse, although the spontaneous style is consistently associated with alcohol misuse. The conclusions highlight the need to consider different aetiologies of alcohol misuse, especially an antisocial/disinhibited profile, and claim for the assessment of decision-making styles and, especially, personality traits to facilitate more successful treatment and prevention programs for alcohol misuse.

Keywords: alcohol misuse; decision-making styles; disinhibited personality; impulsivity; negative affect; personality profiles; sensation seeking.