Understanding the associations between personality traits and the frequency of alcohol intoxication in young males and females: Findings from the United Kingdom

Abstract

The problem of alcohol intoxication is growing and expanding worldwide, which has numerous adverse health and psychological consequences. Thus, it is unsurprising that there are so many efforts made toward underlying the psychological determinants of alcohol intoxication. While some research found that the belief in drinking is important, other research considers personality traits as a risk factor for alcohol consumption and intoxication, which is backed by empirical evidence. However, previous studies classified individuals as binge drinkers or non-binge drinkers (i.e., binary). Thus, it remains unclear how the Big Five personality traits may relate to the frequency of alcohol intoxication in young people aged between 16 and 21 years old, who are more vulnerable to alcohol intoxication. By using two ordinal logistic regressions on 656 young males with a mean age of 18.50±1.63 years old and 630 female drinkers with a mean age of 18.49±1.55 years old who have ever been intoxicated during the past four weeks from Wave 3 (collected via face-to-face interviews or online surveys between 2011 and 2012) UKHLS (United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study), the current research found that Extraversion has a positive association with the frequency of alcohol intoxication in both male (OR = 1.35, p < 0.01, 95 % C.I. [1.13, 1.61]) and female (OR = 1.29, p = 0.01, 95 % C.I. [1.06, 1.57]) drinkers whereas only Conscientiousness (OR = 0.75, p < 0.01, 95 % C.I. [0.61, 0.91]) is negatively connected to the frequency of alcohol intoxication in female drinkers.