There are at least three limitations that should be considered when interpreting the findings of the current study. Given that the sample was a cohort of middleaged Australian adults, the results may not generalize to other ages or samples, particularly those with different degrees of risk for alcohol or mood-related problems (e.g. adolescence, emerging adulthood). In addition, self-report measures of personality were used. Much of the work on ‘bottom-up’ emotional reactivity and ‘top-down’ cognitive control uses laboratory-based measures and/or neuroimaging methods. Applying these alternative measurement methods to similar cognitive and affective factors will be important for understanding how these factors confer risk for both MDD and AUD. Regarding the application of these findings to constructs described in RDoCs, the use of categorical diagnoses rather than symptom counts may be viewed as a limitation. These concerns may be allayed by the analytic approach, however, which assumes that the distributions of liability for MDD and AUD are continuous and normal, and diagnoses represent cases in which liability crosses a threshold (i.e. liability-threshold model; Neale & Cardon, 1992). Finally, and as noted above,
