Abstract
This dissertation examines the influences of alcohol on personality through a multidimensional study of numerous studies and experiments performed by scientists around the world. By scrutinizing the existing research, I elucidate the process by which alcohol impacts personality.
The phenomenon studied in this paper comprises the role of personality as an element of alcohol use and explores the difficulty of finding the connection between individual personalities as related to alcohol consumption. Numerous factors influence an individual’s level and duration of alcohol consumption including emotional maturity, coping abilities, dependency and co-dependency, anxiety, poor interpersonal relations, and low level of tolerance to frustrations. It is important to understand that the study conducted by the author can be considered relevant at all times. Consequently, this dissertation challenges the argument on the influence of personality on the onset, duration, and quantity of alcohol consumption. The results of the research point to the pernicious effects of alcohol on the students who consume it, drawing attention to the fact that the personalities of people who start drinking alcohol change gradually and the number of alterations continues to grow exponentially.
Introduction
Personality refers to unique individual differences in the characteristics patterns of thought, feelings, and behaving. The study of personality borders on understanding the differences in the personality trait and how the various aspects of a person come together as open. There exist five components of personality which include openness to experience, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness (White, 2013).
Alcohol consumption is determined by various factors including social and personality factors. The role of the character as a component of alcohol use has long been contested. However, the evidence is scarce (Loxton et al. 2015). Loxton et al. 2015, summarizes the influence of different social factors and intra-personal characteristics which comprises gender, genetics, and coping with stress as primary determinates of alcohol (Black & Larson, 1999). Therefore, alcohol use influence is a multifactorial model relating to social and intrapersonal factors as well as the presence of substance, attitudes, and expectations directed towards alcohol consumption (Stautz & Cooper, 2013).
The topic is of the essence to the students since it is one of the areas of focus of substance abuse whose understanding is sometimes above the common social and environmental factors. The topic of personality versus alcohol use is a fundamentally important issue that has been of great focus about substance abuse. The importance of the topic lies in it being the basis of research in finding the link between personality traits as related to alcohol involvement. It is critical to establish and demonstrate a robust and consistent relation with alcohol involvement. The potential research areas vary widely but among them are the personality and environment on alcohol consumption, extroversion and alcohol use, introversion, and alcohol consumption.
Literature Review
The study was done in 2015 among 72,949 adults from across eight cohort studies sampled from the USA, United Kingdom, and Australia categorized alcohol consumption into abstinence, moderate drinking, and heavy consumption. The study was aimed at finding the association between personality traits and alcohol intake (Hakulinen et al., 2000).
Hakulinen et al. (2000), learned that that extroversion and conscientiousness were associated with a higher risk of transition from moderate to alcohol use over time. The research found out heavy drinking among the extroverts. The outcome of the individual participant meta-analysis points out to high and increasing alcohol consumption among the extroverts.
The outcome of the study might have been compromised by factors such as the social background of the participants, the cultural practices like the use of alcohol in ceremonies and events among others. The results are consistent with the coursebook that there is a higher tendency of alcohol consumption among the extroverts as compared to other personality traits.
The purpose of the study done by Stewart and Devine was to situate motivations for drinking alcohol within the context of the five-factor model of personality. They wanted to define whether specific personality ranges of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) projected enhancement, coping, social, and conformity motivations in regards to alcohol consumption upgraded from Revised Drinking Motives Questionnaire (DMQ-R) (Stewart & Devine, 2000). A sample of 250 students who consume alcohol with a middling age of 21 years took the NEO-PI-R and DMQ-R.
This study revealed that the two adverse strengthening motivations, the ability to get by and conventionality, were connected to neuroticism and undesirably linked to extraversion. The two positive reinforcement motivations, enhancement and social, were positively related with extraversion and negatively interrelated with conscientiousness. Numerous relapse investigations showed that personality sphere scores estimated two of the four drinking motivations after controlling for the stimuli of other drinking reasons. The development causes were predicted by extraordinary extraversion, low diligence, and coping reasons by great neuroticism. Additional correlational analyses involving individual personality facet scores showed that the depression and self-consciousness aspects of the neuroticism sphere were definitely interconnected. Depression showed a correlation with residual coping, while self-consciousness was positively related to conformity motives. The excitement-seeking and sociability aspects of the extraversion domain were clearly correlated with residual enhancement and social drinking motives, respectively.
These results provide a model for predicting drinking motivations and confirm the existing speculations that motivations for alcohol use are unique according to personality domains and facets. Gaining a deeper understanding of the relationship between personality and alcohol intake motives may be useful in recognizing drinkers whose drinking motivations may be a marker of future heavy and problematic drinking.
The article gives clear insights into the impact of personality on the use of alcohol. However, the study was carried out mainly among the student population. It signifies that there might have been major impacts on the study by the peer influence among the campus students. It has also not specified the position of gender in their education and the implications for the study. The social background of the respondents might have influenced the results.
The study was done in The Netherlands in 2014 by Peeters et al. was to find out the association between early onset of alcohol abuse and persistent alcohol intake among adolescents concerning the development of chronic alcohol use and addiction to other substances of abuse. Peeters et al. wanted to examine the relation of personality and alcohol use during teenage years. They did look at the relationship that exists within the various high-risk trajectories of alcohol abuse in pubertal years. They questioned approximately 374 respondents in their 8th grade. The population studied comprised of 88 boys and 12 girls. The mean age was 13.6 years from seventeen secondary and special education schools. The study assessed adolescents, alcohol consumption, and personality characteristic.
The findings upon the use of latent transition analysis have categorized the population as the non-drinking group, which was the reference group, the onset group, and the early onset group persistent drinking group. They realized that baseline low anxiety sensitivity was a predictor of the membership on the early-onset persistent-drinking group. High prevalence rates of illegal substance use and abuse were found two years later. They conclude that the high sensation seeking together with low anxiety sensitivity seems to be significant predictors of the early onset of alcohol intake among adolescents. Furthermore, a mixture of early-onset and persistent alcohol consumption demonstrated an increased chance of the use of other illicit substances in the adolescents.
The study lacks the gender diversity that would have given a significant study on the topic between the sexes. It is, therefore, a biased kind of research but still holds on the consistent findings on the use of alcohol by the different trajectories.
The study by Kesler and Maclean was done in the use with the objective of examining the relations of the Big Five (openness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness) and the measures of alcohol consumption and misuse. The study was done on adults of fifty and above years from the Health and Retirement Study. Misuse was taken to imply heavy drinking and binge drinking. The randomly selected population completed some questionnaires developed from the Midlife Development Inventory in the 2006 and 2008 HRS rounds (Kesler & Maclean, 2014).
The study found out that personality traits have a link with measures of both alcohol use and alcohol misuse. Agreeableness was associated with an increased possibility of alcohol consumption and abuse. Extraversion and Openness were not associated with the risk of the patterns of alcohol consumption. Neuroticism and contentiousness were not at all predictive of alcohol use and misuse. The findings from the study are contrary to most studies that have pointed out extroversion as being associated with a higher risk for alcohol consumption and addiction.
Kessler and Maclean note the significant association between personality and the use and misuse of alcohol. However, among the limitations of the study was the greater focus on adults. The generalization of the findings may not hold for the other demographic groups. Kessler and Maclean, 2014, note the need for the incorporation of an aspect of personality on healthcare policies. They argue that personality plays a role in raising the cost of healthcare.
The research is done in Norway by Ystrom, Vollrath, and Nordeng was designed to examine the role of personality in the use of medications, cigarettes, and alcohol among pregnant women. The study comprised 835 pregnant women who responded to electronic surveys posted on a pregnancy-related website. The women completed two forms each, one to detail their spirits, drug and cigarette use and one to evaluate character based on the Big Five Inventory (Ystrom, Vollrath & Nordeng, 2012).
The research found that the use of alcohol has major connections with a number of character traits. Women who scored highly in contentiousness were less likely to use over-the-counter drugs, the study found. The women who continued to drink alcohol during pregnancy were detected to have a high level of extraversion and a low level of contentiousness. Neuroticism accompanied a higher probability of quitting smoking while pregnant. This study is consistent with the majority of other studies that point to extraversion as an essential personality trait linked to alcohol consumption.
The limitations of the survey lie in it being a study done on pregnant women alone it cannot, therefore; it lacks general application as a tool for predicting behavior and alcohol abuse in other demographic age sets.
The study performed by Ibáñez Ribes et al. sought to identify the relevance of personality and experiences as psychological factors that determine the development of the use and misuse of alcohol among adolescents. It observed the unswerving, intervened, and diluted effects of the drinking behaviors of teenagers. The five-factor personality domains, positive and negative alcohol expectancies (AEs), alcohol-related problems, and alcohol use over the week and weekend were assessed in a population sample of 361 adolescents (Ibáñez Ribes et al., 2015).
The outcome showed that personality dimensions were openly related to specific drinking habits. Low carefulness, in addition to low directness, was found to be interrelated to the consumption of alcohol on weekends, while low sociability was related to everyday alcohol consumption. The rates and types of alcohol use were thus positively correlated with extraversion, low agreeableness, and low conscientiousness.
Positive alcohol expectancies facilitated the relationship between alcohol consumption and extraversion. Both positive and negative AEs reconciled the correlation between neuroticism and alcohol use and the related problems. The alcohol problems can be projected through an interaction between both positive and negative AEs. This study is consistent with the coursebook and many studies.
This study was of substantial significance in terms of inspecting the complex interaction between character traits and AEs with the purpose of achieving a deeper understanding of the diverse use of alcohol and its associated problems. However, because the study focused only on the adolescent age group, its findings may not be applicable as a general rule for other demographic groups.
Another study completed in Argentina explored alcohol consumption and character traits in a set of female college students. The data was collected from 298 female undergraduates with a mean age of 18.27 years. The research was done in Cordoba, and analysis of the data was obtained through multinomial regression.
Through the study, Pilatti, Cupani, and Pautassi (2015) found that “three drinking categories as abstainers, moderate alcohol users and regular drinkers having heavy drinking episodes” (p. 67). The three groups were then differentiated using three personality traits of extraversion, disinhibition, and experience seeking. They were also differentiated by three alcohol expectancies of sociability, risk or aggression, and negative mood. It was observed that those who drink regularly were more extroverted when consuming alcohol together with restrained drinkers. Moreover, those who scored low in alcohol expectations were exposed to jeopardy and violent behavior. Students who drank habitually received higher scores on the experience, spontaneity, and socialness scales when compared to modest drinkers. They also had greater scores in alcohol expectations for friendliness and bad disposition alcohol probabilities.
It was concluded therefore that personality traits could help predict the problematic alcohol users from the average users. The study is in line with significant findings from other studies where extroversion is associated with alcoholism. The study, however, focused more on the female college students who prove inadequate to use the data for the general population. The study did not feature other factors like peer influence which is common among college students.
The study by Livingston, Oost, Heck & Cochran was aimed at validating the use of personality traits as a projection of substance abuse. In the identified group-specific risk factors. They sampled a group of 704 persons of lesbian, gays, transgender, and bisexual, and queer. It involved questioning the community organizations and social networking sites. They completed online survey questions that contained a measure of personality, stress, and substance abuse. They utilized hierarchical regression models to find out the incremental validity of the use of the five-factor personality model to predict alcohol consumption (Livingston et al., 2015).
Livingston et al. learned that extraversion, as well as conscientiousness, was positively linked to drug and alcohol use. The findings were derived from taking into account the minority stress factors. All but agreeableness were related to drug use at the bivariate analysis level.
The research proved their hypothesis put forward regarding alcohol consumption and personality. It concluded by recommending the need for future research on the position of the normal personality edifices and processes giving a risk of substance abuse among the sexual minority groups. The limitation of the study lies in its lack of specificity on the various gender and sexual groups of the respondents.
The study was done in Brazil by Donadon and Osório aimed at evaluating the links between the predictive worth of personality traits in alcohol-addicted persons with or without related psychiatric abnormalities. Two groups of males above 18 years of age were studied. One group had alcohol dependence and the other group acted as the control having had no abuse of alcohol. They were assessed using Structured Clinical Interview DSM-IV (Donadon & Osório, 2016).
The alcohol dependence group and the control group were recruited from the university hospital outpatients and primary healthcare respectively. After parametric statistics were performed, a correlation between openness and time frame of alcohol consumption. There was no correlation between conscientiousness and length of alcohol use. Extraversion came up as the protective factor against the development of depression and the use of tobacco. Openness worked to protect against anxiety.
The results, though not consistent with many findings regarding alcohol consumption, point out the presentation of alcoholics regarding personality. It also facilitates therapeutic approaches that can promote preventive measures in patients with psychiatric disorders.
The research by Fairbairn et al. sought to find out the hypothesis that extraversion was associated with high alcohol reward sensitivity. It also aimed at examining the postulates that persons with high extraversion gained greater mood enhancement from drinking than those with low extraversion. The research used a group drinking paradigm to survey the hypotheses. The 720 social drinkers in the study used an average. Their social interaction was video-recorded. Duchene smiling was coded via the utilization Facial Action Coding System (Fairbairn et al., 2015).
The research stated that individuals with high levels of extraversion were more prone to mood boost from alcohol than those with low levels. More mediated analyses on Duchenne smiling indicated that the social processes entirely and uniquely accounted for the alcohol reward-sensitivity in persons with high extraversion.
The results, therefore, proved that individuals with high extraversion experience led to an increase in mood enhancement. It also noted the significance of putting into consideration the social processes in the cause of alcohol use problems.
This study is a credible tool in determining the role of extraversion in alcohol enhancement and sensitivity. It is real predictive research as it approaches the hypothesis using a person with a known personality. The cultural effects or gender issues might have had no great significance to the results.
Research Hypothesis
The following alternate hypotheses highlight the direction of the study
- Ha- Alcoholics should register high scores on neuroticism in comparison to non-alcoholics
- Ha-Alcoholics should register low scores on extraversion in comparison to non-alcoholics
- Ha-Alcoholics should register high scores on psychoticism in comparison to non-alcoholics.
The hypotheses are because an individual’s personality predetermines his alcohol consumption. The amount of alcohol consumed by an individual depends on the stimulus of various influences such as emotional adulthood, addiction, nervousness, deprived social affairs, and low level of acceptance of mental breakdowns. Consequently, the study exposes the influence of personality on the starting point, time interval, and amount of alcohol consumed. Three personality measures including psychoticism, neuroticism, and extraversion are instrumental in evaluating both alcoholics and non-alcoholics personalities. The independent variables to guide the study are the alcoholics and non-alcoholics. The dependable variables are the various personality traits. A deliberate comparison between the personality dimensions of alcoholics and non-alcoholics will be undertaken too.
Method
Participants
A separate letter will be sent to the university’s administration to seek their approval for the study. The study will recruit 200 students from a local university by offering them incentives to participate. The sample is further divisible into two groups including alcoholics and non-alcoholics. The alcoholic group will have 100 members while the non-alcoholic group will have 100 members. For an individual to be eligible for the alcoholic group, he has to meet the clinical description of alcoholism. The Mayo Clinic definition of alcohol use disorder will work for this study (Mayo Clinic, 2016). Likewise, the non-alcoholic group will constitute of individuals with no known alcohol consumption history. Each participant will receive a consent letter to alert him or her of the study. The research will only take place during the participant’s free time.
Study Design
The study will employ a correlational design that subjects the participants to a set of predetermined questions. For the purpose of this study, the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R) provided the relevant questions used to evaluate the personality of both the alcoholics and non-alcoholics (Francis, Brown, & Philipchalk, 1992). Each participant will receive a printed copy of the questionnaire. He or she will be required to submit the transcript within four days. Additionally, an oral session will follow during the participants’ submission of their transcripts. The participants shall affirm the authenticity of their answers and provide a brief description of the personality traits. A tape recorder will be instrumental in documenting these sessions. The data will be carefully collected and monitored. Pearson’s correlation coefficient, partial correlation coefficient, and multiple regressions coefficients will be used for data analysis, which further will be presented with the help of a correlational matrix of all variables. The study will be evaluated with the use of statistical procedures and relationships among variables based on observed data.
Materials
- 200 copies of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R).
- A tape recorder
Time Frame
The proposed duration of the study is two weeks. The 1st day involves handing out the questionnaires to the participants. The participants should submit their transcripts within four days. The interview process will take place on day five today 10. The data compilation, assessment, and analysis will take four days.
Statistical Analysis
The factor analysis of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised will be conducted using the principle factors method found in the SAS Statistical Package (Francis, Brown, & Philipchalk, 1992).
The following unit of the paper encapsulates the results resulting from the compound data analysis shown above. The results are based on the surveys that have been processed by the author and will be operated as a helping method for drawing the conclusion and identifying basic patterns of the personality changes that appear due to the effects of alcohol consumption. The analysis is concluded in order to ratify the three hypotheses of the research. The author tried to figure out the personality traits of both categories: drinking and non-drinking individuals. For the existing paper, 100 (one hundred) samples for each group i.e. alcoholics and non-alcoholics have been measured. There are 200 samples mirrored in the paper. The samples have been collected from the volunteer students who wished to take part in the experiment. As a way of exposing the personality, the author has been using an individual character survey designed by Eysenck.
All of the alternate hypotheses of the study were sustained by the outcomes of the test. The Extraversion notch in individuals that do not consume any alcohol is higher as compared to those who do. Additionally, the typical Neuroticism and Psychoticism notch are low in non-drinkers as compared to alcohol consuming students. The discoveries of this research are in line with the conclusions of numerous studies directed in the literature. Quite a few research projects similar to the current study and judgments are in sync with present deductions and have been already debated in the third chapter of this paper.
Conclusion
Alcohol has a harmful effect on practically all human organs, but the stoutest and most overwhelming is the damage done to the brain. The alcohol contained in beer, wine, and vodka enters the human brain together with the blood flow, which initiates the process of intensive cortex destruction. When consuming a trivial amount of alcohol, the blood thickens. That intensifies the blood flow and the motility of erythrocytes while the aggregation decreases.
Next, the blood gets dehydrated and loses its absorption under the influence of alcohol, as it suppresses the antidiuretic hormone.
Keeping in mind the results of the research, the author of this paper states that alcohol limits the range of informative signals perceived. An individual only pays attention and thinks of the most evident and imperative aspects of the situation and ignores information that could also be important since it is on the periphery. Another conclusion made is that drinking alcohol reduces the ability to process and extract the semantic content of the received information. In other words, individuals do not take into account the information received by it and correlates it with existing knowledge and ideas. The actual statement that can be made is the accent on the fact that alcohol massively impacts the personality of an individual even when consumed in small portions.
It has been evidenced that the fluctuations that happen in the personality happen due to the effects of spirits on serotonin in the human body. When the influence of serotonin is deteriorated by an extra amount of alcohol, chemical disproportions end in belligerent behavior or unexpected mood changes. An additional typical personality transformation brought on by alcohol can be a stifling of ethics and an intensification of impulsivity. As alcohol distresses the physique, it works to hold back the reaction speed of the synapses in the brain. Consequently, due to this reduction of speed, a personality’s discerning and thinking will be damaged. When one combines it with the bodily strains that alcohol consumption brings out, a mental state of fretfulness is going to be intensified. These moods can comprise impatience, bad dreams, overall dissatisfaction, and a common spirit of worry, as psychoticism and neuroticism levels are proved to be greater in the addicts.
It can be concluded by the author of this paper that the student individuals who consume alcohol, are unsociable, worrying, harsh, lacking in sensitivity and compassion, unfriendly to other people, and liking weird or strange things. These students can also be considered as emotionally over-reactive and predisposed to irrational mental or physical breakdowns in situations that require resistance to pressure. It has been statistically proven that the more and the longer the individuals drink, the greater the impact on their morality is. Alcoholics often do not experience the slightest subjective reaction. Such a state is completely analogous to moral idiocy and differs from it only in the way of origin. Furthermore, extraversion presence is attested to be of a higher level in non-drinkers as compared to drinkers, which means that those who do not consume any alcohol are frank, outgoing, and friendly individuals. It can be abridged that personality growth is superior in non-addicted compared to the addicted.
As the numerous studies in the other works, the results of the present research show clearly that such personality models as neuroticism and psychoticism are developed at a much higher rate in addicts as compared to non-addicts. In addition, extraversion has been demonstrated to be higher in non-addicts as compared to those addicted to alcohol. This fact contributes to the idea that alcohol visibly harms the personality. The dissertation dwelled on the harmful effects of alcohol consumption and provided a comparative analysis of the personal traits of usual drinkers and those who do not consume alcohol at all. This research paper can be useful to not only psychological health specialists, such as psychiatrists and psychoanalysts but also to diverse organizations, such as psychiatric clinics or rehabs. It is likely to assist mental shape experts in planning a treatment technique for the individuals who are addicted to alcohol.
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