Addictive Behaviours and Addiction-Prone Personality Traits: Associations with a Dopamine Multilocus Genetic Profile

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine reward-related genetic risk for addictive behaviors in a healthy community sample (n = 217) of men and women. We tested a mediation model predicting that a quantitative multilocus genetic profile score - reflecting the additive effects of alleles known to confer relatively increased dopamine signaling in the ventral striatum - would relate positively to a composite measure of addictive behaviors, and that this association would be mediated by personality traits consistently associated with addiction disorders. Our model was strongly supported by the data, and accounted for 24% of the variance in addictive behaviors. These data suggest that brain reward processes tend to exert their influence on addiction risk by their role in the development of relatively stable personality traits associated with addictive behaviors.