Broadly, the pharmacological vulnerability model (Sher, 1991) proposes that individuals have differential responses to acute and/or chronic effects of alcohol; that is, some individuals may be more or less sensitive to either positive or negative reinforcement or to punishing effects of alcohol (see Sher et al., 1999, for more details). This general notion that variation in personality predicts vulnerability to certain alcohol effects has been around for more than 80 years (Cleckley, 1982; MacDougall, 1929). These individual differences in response to alcohol are thought to be relevant to the development of AUDs.
