The production of this book represents a culmination for me of some 25
years of interest in the field of personality and substance use and
abuse. In choosing the field of substanceuse and abuse for the focus of
our research, all of the investi- tors collaborating in this research
have been sustained by the awareness that the work we are doing has an
important purpose. Substance abuse continues to have enormous impacts on
individuals and families, and prevention and treatment - proaches
developed to date have not always been as successful as we would hope to
see. New advances in our fundamental understanding of the causal mec-
nisms involved in the development ofaddiction may be necessary to
advance our success in developing new forms of prevention and treatment
for alcohol and drug abuse. The work in this book builds on the work of
numerous previous investi- tors who have been drawn to investigate this
topic. As you will notice in the extensive reference list, there have
been hundreds of articles published on this topic. Although each of
these references has added a small piece to our und- standing of the
relationship between personality and alcohol abuse, the majority of
these studies have been done on clinical samples and often involved no
control groups or poorly matched control groups. Several important
previous longitu- nal investigations have been conducted, but these
investigations have usually not included general population samples or
comprehensivepersonality test batterie