Alcoholism is a highly heritable disorder with heritability estimates of susceptibility between 50% and 60% [19]. Alcohol expectancies—i.e., beliefs about the drug’s impact on behavior—and subjective experience have been shown to be a genetically influenced characteristic having a heritability factor between 0.4 and 0.6 [20,21], with greater alcohol consumption found for high-risk compared to low-risk families [22]. The distinctive resting EEG pattern of an individual tends to be highly heritable and stable [23,24], with the average heritability for delta, theta, alpha, and beta frequencies at 76%, 89%, 89%, and 86%, respectively [25]. Hence, an “alcoholism phenotype” may be observed in the EEG of high-risk children, although EEG power spectra findings from low- and high-risk for alcoholism descendants are variable: Children of alcoholic parents have more fast (beta) activity than children without alcoholic parents [26], while no differences in baseline EEG variables in the high frequency range were found for older (19–25) populations [27,28]. Thus, familial alcoholism covaries with behavioral and neuroimaging measures of binge drinking [7,29] and is an important background variable to consider when investigating binge drinking’s CNS effects.
