Some research has demonstrated an association between alcoholism in multiple biological relatives and offspring behavior. Research on families with at least two brothers having alcohol use disorder found that such heavy familial loading for alcoholism is associated with extraversion and with alcohol use in youth 8 to 18 years old (Hill and Yuan, 1999). However, “extraversion” only partially overlaps with the larger concept of behavioral disinihibition and among teenagers may include normative socially-mediated drinking experiences. Fuller and colleagues (2003), in contrast, focused on aggression in childhood and found higher scores in the presence of grandparent and parent alcohol problems. Although their assessments of behavior were limited (i.e., neither study assessed the full range of undercontrolled behaviors that are implicated in alcoholism theory), these studies suggest that a quantitative index of family alcohol problems (i.e., density) might predict aspects of behavior in childhood that tap the larger construct of behavioral undercontrol.
