alcohol dependence diagnosis. This could happen if mood-congruent recall bias (Bower, 1981) affected reporting of childhood maltreatments, since those with current alcohol dependence are more likely to have depressed mood than others (Schuckit et al. 1997; Hasin et al. 2007). A sensitivity analysis indicated that such misclassification is unlikely because excluding respondents with current alcohol dependence and analyzing only those with past-only alcohol dependence did not change the main results for sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and physical neglect, which all remained significant predictors of alcohol dependence controlling for demographics, cooccurring maltreatments and other adverse childhood experiences (p<0.001). Moreover, even if those with lifetime alcohol dependence are more likely to recall and report maltreatment than those without lifetime alcohol dependence, this bias (away from the null) would likely be cancelled out by the bias from the false negatives (towards the null). (5) We did not reanalyze our data using preliminary proxies for alcohol use disorder as it will be defined in DSM-5, in part because the new criteria have not been finalized and in part because of the complexities involved in such an extension of the present study. The relationships we report should be investigated after DSM-5 is finalized
