Relations between personality and drinking motives in young adults

The purpose of the present study was to place drinking motives within the c ontext of the Five-Factor Model of personality. Specifically, we sought to determine whether certain personality domains and facets of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) predict Enhancement, Coping, Social, and/ or Conformity drinking motives from the Revised Drinking Motives Questionna ire (DMQ-R). A sample of 256 university student drinkers (M age = 21.3 year s) completed the NEO-PI-R and DMQ-R. In bivariate correlations, the two neg ative reinforcement motives (Coping and Conformity) were positively correla ted with Neuroticism and negatively correlated with Extraversion. The two p ositive reinforcement motives (Enhancement and Social) were positively corr elated with Extraversion and negatively correlated with Conscientiousness. Multiple regression analyses revealed that personality domain scores predic ted two of the four drinking motives (i.e. the internal drinking motives of Coping and Enhancement), after controlling for the influences of alternati ve drinking motives. Enhancement Motives were predicted by high Extraversio n and low Conscientiousness, and Coping Motives by high Neuroticism. Supple mentary correlational analyses involving certain personality facet scores r evealed that the depression and self-consciousness facets of the Neuroticis m domain were positively correlated with residual Coping a;nd Conformity Mo tives, respectively, and that the excitement-seeking and gregariousness fac ets of the Extraversion domain were positively correlated with residual Enh ancement and Social Motives, respectively. These results provide further va lidation of Cox and Klinger's 2 x 2 (valence [positive vs negative reinforc ement] x source [internal vs external]) model of drinking motivations, and confirm previous speculations that drinking motives are distinguishable on the basis of personality domains and facets. Understanding the relations be tween personality and drinking motives may prove useful in identifying youn g drinkers whose drinking motivations may portend the development of heavy and/or problem drinking. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved .