Understanding the construct of impulsivity and its relationship to alcohol use disorders

By D. Dick, Gregory T. Smith, P. Olausson, Suzanne H. Mitchell, Robert F. Leeman, Stephanie S. O’Malley, K. Sher. Addiction Biology, 2010

692 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There are well‐established links between impulsivity and alcohol use in humans and other model organisms; however, the etiological nature of these associations remains unclear. This is likely due, in part, to the heterogeneous nature of the construct of impulsivity. Many different measures of impulsivity have been employed in human studies, using both questionnaire and laboratory‐based tasks. Animal studies also use multiple tasks to assess the construct of impulsivity. In both human and animal studies, different measures of impulsivity often show little correlation and are differentially related to outcome, suggesting that the impulsivity construct may actually consist of a number of more homogeneous (and potentially more meaningful) subfacets. Here, we provide an overview of the different measures of impulsivity used across human and animal studies, evidence that the construct of impulsivity may be better studied in the context of more meaningful subfacets, and recommendations for how research in this direction may provide for better consilience between human and animal studies of the connection between impulsivity and alcohol use.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Epidemiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98691c9665dc8db2f30c59f5ad1148c7daeb6261

Citations in the corpus

• The Neuroscience of Drug Reward and Addiction. (2019, neutral): “…that influ-ences a vulnerability for disorders characterized by pathological tendencies to violate social norms or to engage in oppositional behaviors (clustered as disorders with externalizing tendencies) (178), providing a link to the heterogeneous construct referred to as impulsivity (87).”