Alcoholism is a disease that often goes undiagnosed and untreated. The current treatment results of alcoholism are far from satisfactory. One reason for this situation is that there is extensive heterogeneity among alcoholics. Cloninger’s typology divides alcoholics into two subgroups: late-onset, anxiety-prone type 1 alcoholics and early-onset, impulsive type 2 alcoholics. The composition of t...

Aims: The Cloninger type 1 alcoholics are prone to anxiety, and in many cases patients have begun to use alcohol in order to relieve their anxiety. We have previously reported a decrease of the serotonin transporter density in the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC) in type 1 alcoholics. The 5-HT1A receptors are the binding sites for anxiolytic drug buspirone. We aimed to investigate th...

Genetic analysis of data from 2,680 adult Australian twin pairs demonstrated significant genetic contributions to variation in scores on the Harm Avoidance, Novelty Seeking, and Reward Dependence scales of Cloninger's Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ), accounting for between 54% and 61% of the stable variation in these traits. Multivariate genetic triangular decomposition models we...

Despite the wide use of the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ) in Western populations as a useful tool integrating both genetic and environmental influences on personality, some of its constructs remain questionable. In this study, we examined the psychometric properties of the TPQ and its relationship with aggression in Taiwanese adults. The subjects were 201 Taiwanese adults of wi...

OBJECTIVE Personality is defined as the trait-like qualities of a person. However, it has been recently suggested that the state effect of a situation leads to changes in scores on personality assessments. We predicted that traumatic experiences would induce changes not only in personality scores but also in the factor structures of personality assessments. METHODS MethodsaaWe conducted a cro...

Cloninger (Cloninger CR. Neurogenetic adaptive mechanisms in alcoholism. Science 1987: 236: 410-416) proposed three basic personality dimensions for temperament: novelty seeking, harm avoidance, and reward dependence. He suggested that novelty seeking primarily utilized dopamine pathways, harm avoidance utilized serotonin pathways, and reward dependence utilized norepinephrine pathways. Subsequ...

A number of alcoholism1 ty­ ative contributions of genetic and en­ coholic: Environmental factors also pologies have been developed vironmental factors to the individual’s play a role in establishing a person’s during the past one­and­a­half susceptibility for developing the disease susceptibility to alcoholism (Kaij 1960). centuries. Equally diverse are the fac­ (Cloninger et al. 1981). The tw...

181 There is no single, simple explanation for why some individuals develop problems with alcohol. One of the central findings of the large body of research that has examined the psychosocial causes, or etiology, of alcohol use is that there are multiple pathways to behavior that involves alcohol consumption (Cloninger et al. 1996; Sher et al. 1997; Zucker et al. 1994). Multiple biological and ...