What Makes an Addictive Personality?
In the study, which appears in the July issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers analyzed personality assessments of nearly 1,000 18-year-old men and women from Dunedin, New Zealand, some of whom were diagnosed with problem gambling, alcohol, marijuana, or nicotine use by the time they were 21. First, researchers examined the associations between problem gambling and each of the three substance-abuse disorders. Then they compared 10 basic personality variations among people in each disorder group to those who did not develop gambling or substance abuse problems. The personality profile associated with problem gambling was very similar to that associated with other substance-related addictive disorders, they write. They found that people with problem gambling in the past year were three times as likely to have one of the three substance-abuse disorders. Researchers say the magnitude of this association is nearly as strong as the well-established association between alcoh
