Drinking motives as mediators between personality traits and alcohol use among young French people

Abstract

IntroductionRelationships between personality traits and alcohol consumption behaviors have been inconsistently found. Research suggests that taking into account more proximal factors, such as drinking motives, would aid in explaining these inconsistent findings. MethodParticipants (N = 690) were administered measures of alcohol use, drinking motives and personality traits. Five multiple parallel mediator models were elaborated wherein drinking motives mediated the relationship between each trait and AUDIT scores once having controlled for age, school group and sex. ResultsEnhancement, social and conformity motives mediated the relationship between extraversion and alcohol use. The indirect effect between agreeableness or conscientiousness and alcohol use was mediated by decreased coping-depression, enhancement and social motives. Interestingly, neuroticism alone did not predict alcohol consumption, but a case of competitive mediation was observed. Neuroticism led to heightened coping-depression motives, which led to increased alcohol use, but also to increased conformity motives, which led to depleted alcohol consumption. DiscussionOur study suggests that most Big 5 personality traits have a relationship with alcohol consumption in part because they develop into drinking motives. Inconsistent findings observed in the extent literature were explained in part by conditional processes.