Abstract
Addiction science largely has individual behavior as its focus, albeit at increasingly differentiated levels of analysis, ranging from behavior to brain to genes. Context is rarely brought into the causal matrix, although without the addictive object, addiction could not occur. Moreover, although the emergence of addiction is a developmental process, developmental changes in these relationships are rarely examined. Findings that address these issues are reported from a 28-year-long prospective high risk for alcoholism family study, the Michigan Longitudinal Study, which was designed to evaluate these cross-development linkages from early childhood to early adulthood, across multiple levels of analysis involving genes, neural circuitry, behavior, and social context. Analyses focus on the network of GABA2 relationships with externalizing behavior and with nucleus accumbens responsivity, as they relate to problems of alcohol use over the course of adolescence. They illustrate the moderating effect of social relationships—but only in specific portions of adolescence.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by grants AA07065, AA012217, and DA027261 from the National Institutes of Health. I am especially indebted to Drs. Mary Heitzeg, Elisa Trucco, and Sandra Villafuerte, whose work has been a central part of this account.
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Zucker, R. (2014). Genes, Brain, Behavior, and Context: The Developmental Matrix of Addictive Behavior. In: Stoltenberg, S. (eds) Genes and the Motivation to Use Substances. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, vol 61. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0653-6_4
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