Genetics and Addiction
Jessica Bella
PSY 101-010
October 16, 2013

Genetics and Addiction The increase in substance use that some young people experience across late childhood and early adolescence contributes to no normative developmental trajectory that includes affiliation with unconventional peers, lack of motivation, poor academic performance, and school drop outs (Brown & Murry, 2009). Basically researchers are saying that kids that grow up in a bad environment or are around peers that are a bad influence will become addicted to drugs. Young adolescents with temperamental characteristics, such as high activity level and emotional intensity that render them vulnerable to substance use becomes less likely to use if their family environments provide instrumental and emotional support (Brody & McCoy, 1998). A lot of kids that become users, become users because they don’t have a family with support, or they have parents that are addicts themselves. In a lot of rural areas, or “ghettos and hoods” as people call them, there are lots of kids that use drugs, due to the fact that it is easy access. Many kids that grow up in this environment are usually considered lower class, come from parents that don’t have very much money and live off the government. Which leads to kids dropping out of school, joining gangs, and using gangs (Wills, et al., 2007). Longitudinal studies have documented the importance of selection in the relationship between adolescents and peer behaviors (Wills & Clearly, 1999). Genetically informed designs, in contrast, offer many advantages for parsing selection from causation. For example, when comparing two groups of unrelated individuals, observed differences in alcohol use may be due to genetic influences on drinking behavior or environmental experiences such as growing up with alcoholic parents (Simons-Motrin & Chen, 2006) Kids usually pick their friends based off of if they can relate from them or not. Usually the kids that come from the same backgrounds link up together. Studies show that kids that come from alcoholic parents usually become good friends, because they are also drinking together or using other drugs together. The environment that you grow up in rather it’s the family environment or your social environment it has a huge impact on your life. Research is offered as an illustration of how theoretical relationships between genetic dispositions, personality dimensions, and alcohol-related problems can be addressed in behavior genetic analyses (Han& McGue 2000). Research is provided by cumulative evidence that genes influence alcohol consumption and alcohol problems as well as the personality variables that predict those (Bouchard & Loehlin, 2001). Genetic variation contributes to individual differences in major dimensions of personality is one of the most consistent findings in psychology (Finn & Wood, 2000). When people use and abuse alcohol, they are also putting their personality at risk, for example they are more likely to be really angry and aggressive. When people grow up in that environment because of their parents being this way they are more likely to grow up do the same thing and repeat the same cycle. Genetics play a huge role on adolescents and what they do as they grow up. Alcohol use is extremely common in adolescence. Recent surveys show that a substantial majority of adolescence (80-93%) have reported at least some experience with alcohol (Jalali, Crocetti & Turner, 1981). Hull (1981) suggested that individuals who are highly self-aware and who receive failure feedback from the environment may use alcohol to decrease their awareness of such negative self-relevant information. The self-awareness theory also has a big impact on adolescent alcohol use, highly self-aware individuals react more negatively to failure feedback than do less self-aware individuals (Hull, 1987). Failure feedback is more strongly related to alcohol consumption for highly