The current study investigated the contribution of personality to drinking risk among first year U.S. college students. We applied recent advances in the basic personality literature to this problem. One of the key advances has been to differentiate between the disposition to seek new, thrilling sensations on the one hand, and the disposition to engage in rash acts secondary to the experience of intense emotions on the other hand. The former (sensation seeking) is perhaps driven by a need for stimulation. The latter (positive and negative urgency), in contrast, appears to have the characteristic of emotional dysregulation: individuals act in ways inconsistent with their long-term interests because they are either extremely distressed or extremely excited and so lack the cognitive controls that are typically in place [29, 30].
