The Addiction-Prone Personality

Book excerpt: The production of this book represents a culmination for me of some 25 years of interest in the field of personality and substance use and abuse. In choosing the field of substanceuse and abuse for the focus of our research, all of the investi- tors collaborating in this research have been sustained by the awareness that the work we are doing has an important purpose. Substance abuse continues to have enormous impacts on individuals and families,and prevention and treatment - proaches developed to date have not always been as successful as we would hope to see. New advances in our fundamental understanding of the causal mec- nisms involved in the development ofaddiction may be necessary to advance our success in developing new forms of prevention and treatment for alcohol and drug abuse. The work in this book builds on the work of numerous previous investi- tors who have been drawn to investigate this topic. As you will notice in the extensive reference list, there have been hundreds of articles published on this topic. Although each of these references has added a small piece to our und- standing of the relationship between personality and alcohol abuse, the majority of these studies have been done on clinical samples and often involved no control groups or poorly matched control groups. Several important previous longitu- nal investigations have been conducted,but these investigations have usually not included general population samples or comprehensivepersonality test batteries.