Michela Gatta, Andrea Spoto, Lamboglia Serena,
Introduction: This study aimed to analyze the growing phenomenon of adolescent alcohol consumption and its association with behavioral disorders, focusing particularly on the “impulsiveness” trait and seeking any gender-related differences.
Subjects and methods: The sample consisted of 273 secondary school pupils (in 9th to 13th grade), 140 of them males and 133 females, with a mean age of 15.4 years ± 1.1 SD.
The following tests were administered:
- The Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11) to measure their impulsiveness;
- The Youth Self Report 11-18 (YSR) to identify any psychobehavioral problems;
- The Adolescents’ Saturday Nights Questionnaire (QAS) (Questionario Adolescenti Sabato Sera) (Gallimberti et al, 2011) to obtain information on the modality and quantity of their alcohol consumption.
Results: While a greater degree of impulsiveness was clearly associated with alcohol consumption, heavier drinkers were not more impulsive than more moderate drinkers. This would seem to confirm the hypothesis that a tendency for impulsiveness predisposes to alcohol consumption. On the other hand, our data indicate a higher prevalence of behavioral disorders among heavy drinkers than among more moderate drinkers: the higher the score on the behavioral disorder scales, the higher the alcohol consumption. This picture could represent the behavioral correlates associated with impulsiveness, exacerbated by the neurobiological effects of alcohol on the brain and particularly on the frontal regions (still immature in preadolescence and adolescence), i.e. the site of the functions that are altered in behavioral disorders.
The ‘gender’ variable did not influence the relationship between alcohol consumption and impulsiveness in our sample, but the two genders seemed to differ in their susceptibility to different subdomains of impulsiveness and behavioral disorders, i.e. non-planning impulsiveness with conduct disorder in males and motor impulsiveness with oppositional-defiant disorder in females.
Conclusion: This finding is of interest because it enables us to link the use and effects of alcohol in adolescence with certain psychopathologies and to identify a possibly alcohol-related tendency of one or other gender to develop a given disorder.