Brian M Hicks

• University of Michigan

We examined associations among early delinquency and key personality traits, psychopathology, and environmental factors among youth enrolled in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development - Social Development (ABCD-SD) study, a substudy of the national ABCD study. Establishing these associations at baseline is an important step for identifying early...

There was a large spike in gun purchases and gun violence during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We used an online U.S. national survey (N = 1036) to examine the characteristics of people who purchased a gun between March 2020 and October 2021 (n = 103) and compared them to non-gun owners (n = 763) and people who own a...

Objective: Black youth are disproportionately exposed to school exclusionary discipline. We examined the impact of race on age at the onset of school disciplinary actions and police contact, and the rate of receiving increasingly severe disciplinary actions. Method: Youth ages 10 to 15 years old (N = 2,042) and their caregivers participating in the...

Youth self-reports are a mainstay of delinquency assessment; however, making valid inferences about delinquency using these assessments requires equivalent measurement across groups of theoretical interest. We examined whether a brief 10-item delinquency measure exhibited measurement invariance across non-Hispanic White (n = 6,064) and Black (n = 1...

Background: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified hundreds of loci associated with alcohol-related traits. GWAS permit the calculation of polygenic risk scores (PRS), which aggregate genetic risk for a trait across the genome. To evaluate the usefulness of a PRS for problematic alcohol use (PAU)-which subsumes alcohol use disorder...

The murder of George Floyd and subsequent mass protest movement in the summer of 2020 brought policing, race, and police brutality to the forefront of American political discourse. We examined mean-levels of attitudes about police and race using online surveys administered at five time points from June 2020 to October 2021 (n ~ 1000 at each wave) t...

There was a large spike in gun purchases and gun violence during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We used an online U.S. national survey (N = 1036) to examine the characteristics of people who purchased a gun between March 2020 and October 2021 (n = 103) and compared them to non-gun owners (n = 763) and people who own a...

Objective: Peer groups represent a critical developmental context in adolescence, and there are many well-documented associations between personality and peer behavior at this age. However, the precise nature and direction of these associations are difficult to determine as youth both select into, and are influenced by, their peers. Method: We t...

The murder of George Floyd and subsequent mass protest movement in the summer of 2020 brought policing, race, and police brutality to the forefront of American political discourse. We examined mean-levels of attitudes about police and race using online surveys administered at five time points from June 2020 to October 2021 (n ~ 1000 at each wave) t...

The political rise of Donald Trump and the ideology of Trumpism has had a major impact on American politics, culture, and its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We began the process of validating a psychometric model of Trumpism using three waves (~1000 participants per wave) of data from national online surveys of adults conducted in the United St...

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a highly contagious disease responsible for millions of deaths worldwide. Effective vaccines against COVID-19 are now available, however, an extreme form of vaccine hesitancy known as anti-vax attitudes challenge vaccine acceptance and distribution efforts. To understand these anti-vax attitudes and their associa...

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a highly contagious disease responsible for millions of deaths worldwide. Effective vaccines against COVID-19 are now available, however, an extreme form of vaccine hesitancy known as anti-vax attitudes challenge vaccine acceptance and distribution efforts. To understand these anti-vax attitudes and their associa...

Convergent research identifies a general factor (“P factor”) that confers transdiagnostic risk for psychopathology. Large-scale networks are key organizational units of the human brain. However, studies of altered network connectivity patterns associated with the P factor are limited, especially in early adolescence when most mental disorders are f...

Background Recent well-powered genome-wide association studies have enhanced prediction of substance use outcomes via polygenic scores (PGSs). Here, we test (1) whether these scores contribute to prediction over-and-above family history, (2) the extent to which PGS prediction reflects inherited genetic variation v. demography (population stratifica...

Background and Aims Molecular genetic studies of alcohol and nicotine use have identified many genome-wide association study (GWAS) loci. We measured associations between drinking and smoking polygenic scores (PGS) and trajectories of alcohol and nicotine use outcomes from late childhood to early adulthood, substance-specific versus broader-liabili...

Though sexuality and personality are related domains of personhood, the dynamics of their co-development remains relatively unexplored, especially during adolescence when partnered sexual behaviors tend to emerge. We examined the co-development between personality and sexuality at phenotypic and genetic levels of analysis from middle childhood to l...

Educational success is associated with greater quality of life and depends, in part, on heritable cognitive and non-cognitive traits. We used polygenic scores (PGS) for smoking and educational attainment to examine different genetic influences on facets of academic adjustment in adolescence and educational attainment in adulthood. PGSs were calcula...

It remains unclear how the seemingly ubiquitous use of the internet impacts user’s offline personal relationships, particularly those that are romantic or sexual. Therefore, we conducted a national online survey to better understand the associations among internet use, sexual behavior, and adjustment called the Sexual Behaviors, Internet Use, and P...

Sexual behaviors and substance use exhibit high rates of co-occurrence and similar patterns of age-related change, with typical initiation in middle adolescence followed by large increases in late adolescence and emerging adulthood. Because adolescent sexual behaviors are associated with negative health consequences including sexually-transmitted i...

BACKGROUND: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) most often onsets in young adulthood (YAO), but prospective studies are needed to determine whether an onset in adolescence (AO) confers a more severe trajectory of psychiatric problems (e.g., depression, antisocial behavior, and other substance use) alongside AUD in men and women.METHODS: Using a prospective...

Background: Regular cannabis use, even without cannabis use disorder (CUD), is associated with numerous biopsychosocial problems. Biopsychosocial risk factors that precede regular use and CUD might reflect broader pre-existing risk factors rather than the consequence of cannabis use. We aimed to (1) replicate prior work differentiating psychosocia...

We examined whether a polygenic score (PGS) for smoking measured genetic risk for general behavioral disinhibition by estimating its associations with externalizing and internalizing psychopathology and related personality traits at multiple time points in adolescence (ages 11, 14, and 17 years; N = 3,225). The smoking PGS had strong associations w...

Youth self-reports are a mainstay of delinquency assessment. However, making valid inferences about delinquency using these assessments requires equivalent measurement across groups of theoretical interest. We therefore examined whether a brief 10-item delinquency measure exhibited measurement invariance across non-Hispanic White (n=6064) and Black...

Peer groups provide a critical developmental context in adolescence, and there are many well-documented associations between personality and peer behavior at this age. However, the precise nature and direction of these associations are difficult to determine as youth both select into and are influenced by their friends. We thus examined the phenoty...

Many models of psychopathology include a single general factor of psychopathology (GFP) or “ p factor” to account for covariation across symptoms. The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study provides a rich opportunity to study the development of the GFP. However, a variety of approaches for modeling the GFP have emerged, raising questi...

Educational success is associated with greater quality of life and depends, in part, on heritable cognitive and non-cognitive traits. We used polygenic scores (PGS) for smoking—a measure of genetic influences on behavioral disinhibition—and educational attainment to examine different genetic influences on facets of academic adjustment in adolescenc...

Background Structural models of psychopathology consistently identify internalizing (INT) and externalizing (EXT) specific factors as well as a superordinate factor that captures their shared variance, the p factor. Questions remain, however, about the meaning of these data-driven dimensions and the interpretability and distinguishability of the la...

Background and aims: Social context is an important factor in determining the developmental trajectory of alcohol use. We examined the co-development between alcohol use problems and antisocial peer affiliation. We also estimated the genetic and environmental influences on alcohol use problems, antisocial peer affiliation and their co-development...

Peer groups influence the emergence of sexual behaviors in adolescence, but many details regarding the mechanisms underlying these effects have yet to be described. We examined the phenotypic, genetic, and environmental links between both antisocial and prosocial peer characteristics, and several sexual behaviors from middle childhood to late adole...

Aims: Social context is an important factor in determining the developmental trajectory of alcohol use. We examined the co-development between alcohol use problems and antisocial peer affiliation in a longitudinal sample of twins from the United States mid-west region, beginning prior to alcohol initiation and extending across key developmental per...

We critique Roy et al.'s (2020; this issue) approach to characterizing the item-level factor structure of the three scales of the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM), in light of the manner in which the TriPM scales were developed, the purposes they were designed to serve, and the growing body of evidence supporting their construct validity. We f...

BACKGROUND Convergent research identifies a general factor (“P factor”) that confers transdiagnostic risk for psychopathology. However, brain functional connectivity patterns that underpin the P factor remain poorly understood, especially at the transition to adolescence when many serious mental disorders have their onset. OBJECTIVE Identify a dis...

Importance: Large consortia of genome wide association studies have yielded more accurate polygenic risk scores (PRS) that aggregate the small effects of many genetic variants to characterize the genetic architecture of disorders and provide a personalized measure of genetic risk. Objective: We examined whether a PRS for smoking measured genetic ri...

Importance Large consortia of genome wide association studies have yielded more accurate polygenic risk scores (PRS) that aggregate the small effects of many genetic variants to characterize the genetic architecture of disorders and provide a personalized measure of genetic risk. Objective We examined whether a PRS for smoking measured genetic ris...

Objective Molecular genetic studies of alcohol and nicotine have identified many genome-wide loci. We examined the predictive utility of drinking and smoking polygenic scores (PGS) for alcohol and nicotine use from late childhood to early adulthood, substance-specific versus broader-liability PGS effects, and if PGS performance varied between consu...

Introduction: Structural models of psychopathology consistently identify internalizing (INT) and externalizing (EXT) specific factors as well as a superordinate factor that captures their shared variance, the P factor. Questions remain, however, about meaning of these data-driven dimensions and the interpretability and distinguishability of the lar...

Objective: Molecular genetic studies of alcohol and nicotine have identified many genome-wide loci. We examined the predictive utility of drinking and smoking polygenic scores (PGS) for alcohol and nicotine use from late childhood to early adulthood, substance-specific versus broader-liability PGS effects, and if PGS performance varied between cons...

Background: Many contemporary structural models of psychopathology include a single general factor of psychopathology (GFP) or “p factor”, to account for covariation across a wide range of psychiatric symptoms. The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is a large longitudinal study of youth that provides a rich opportunity to study th...

Sexual debut, or first intercourse, predicts problem behaviors such as substance use. This association could reflect a direct effect of debut itself, general developmental trends, or the fact that some youth are more predisposed to a wide array of problem behaviors (e.g., risky sex, substance use). Understanding the association between sexual debut...

Sexual debut, or first intercourse, predicts problem behaviors such as substance use. This association could reflect a direct effect of debut itself, general developmental trends, or the fact that some youth are more predisposed to a wide array of problem behaviors (e.g., risky sex, substance use). Understanding the association between sexual debut...

Sexual development entails many experiences and is a major feature of adolescence. Most relevant behavioral genetic studies, however, focus primarily on sexual behaviors associated with health risks. We took a more normative, developmental perspective by examining genetic and environmental influences on five sexual behaviors ranging from dating to...

Prior research has shown that person-level characteristics (e.g., temperament, personality) correlate and interact with social-contextual factors (e.g., parent–child relationship quality, antisocial peer affiliation) to predict adolescent substance use, but less research has examined similar processes for adult substance use problems. We addressed...

We describe efforts to formulate a quantitative measurement model for boldness, a construct that has been intensively discussed and investigated in the psychopathy literature in recent years. Although the Fearless Dominance factor of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI-FD) has served as a major referent for studying this dispositional const...

Objective: To determine if higher potency cannabis is associated with earlier progression to regular cannabis use, daily cannabis use, and cannabis use disorder symptom onset. Methods: Data sources were the Michigan Longitudinal Study, an ongoing prospective, high-risk family study investigating the course and predictors for substance use disord...

The feedback negativity (FN) and reward positivity (RewP) are event-related brain potentials (ERPs) that follow the presentation of negative and positive feedback information, respectively, and have become the focus of recent research on psychopathology because of their associations with symptom severity of and risk for depression. We advanced our...

The distinction between low-anxious primary versus high-anxious secondary psychopathy is well-established among incarcerated adults and adolescents. However, no studies have used a prospective longitudinal approach to explore whether primary versus secondary psychopathy variants have different rates of alcohol and marijuana use across adolescence,...

A longstanding hypothesis is that some alcohol use problems (AUP) develop and are maintained through the ‘self-medication’ of internalizing (INT; depression and anxiety) problems. However, their high rate of co-occurrence with one another and with externalizing (EXT; antisocial behavior and impulse control) problems obscures any causal association...

A large proportion of the public health costs of alcohol use disorder (AUD) can be accounted for by a small percentage of severe cases with a chronic course starting in adolescence and persisting into adulthood. However, chronicity may be a less effective marker of AUD severity in women than men due to a gender risk–severity paradox, wherein compar...

Background In the United States, cannabis accessibility has continued to rise as the perception of its harmfulness has decreased. Only about 30% of regular cannabis users develop cannabis use disorder (CUD), but it is unclear if individuals who use cannabis regularly without ever developing CUD experience notable psychosocial impairment across the...

Existing categorical models of personality disorder diagnoses capture heterogeneous populations in terms of symptom presentation and etiological influences on personality pathology. Though several well-validated alternative dimensional trait models (i.e., variable-centered approaches) of personality disorders have been developed, person-centered ap...

Psychopathy refers to a heterogeneous set of harmful dark traits and behaviors, including superficial charm, callousness, irresponsibility, and antisocial behavior. The triarchic psychopathy model (TriPM) posits that psychopathy is the combination of 3 traits: boldness, disinhibition, and meanness. However, little research has examined the concurre...

Background: Can core genetic liabilities for suicidal behavior be indexed using psychological and neural indicators combined? The current work addressed this question by examining phenotypic and genotypic associations of two biobehavioral traits, threat sensitivity (THT) and disinhibition (DIS) – operationalized as psychoneurometric variables (i.e....

Objective: Personality traits related to negative emotionality and low constraint are strong correlates of alcohol use disorder (AUD), but few studies have evaluated the prospective interplay between these traits and AUD symptoms from adolescence to young adulthood. Method: The Minnesota Twin Family Study (N = 2,769) was used to examine the deve...

Threat sensitivity (THT) and weak inhibitory control (or disinhibition; DIS) are trait constructs that relate to multiple types of psychopathology and can be assessed psychoneurometrically (i.e., using self-report and physiological indicators combined). However, to establish that psychoneurometric assessments of THT and DIS index biologically-based...

Mõttus alerts us to the widespread predictive heterogeneity of different indicators of the same trait. This heterogeneity violates the assumption that traits have causal unity in their developmental antecedents and effects on outcomes. I would go a step further: broader traits are useful units for description and prediction but not for explaining p...

Middle childhood is a crucial juncture in the lifespan where children work towards achieving a sense of competence foundational for future development. However, middle childhood has historically been underrepresented in the personality literature. The current study provides a comprehensive examination of personality in middle childhood using a larg...

Gene × Environment interaction contributes to externalizing disorders in childhood and adolescence, but little is known about whether such effects are long lasting or present in adulthood. We examined gene–environment interplay in the concurrent and prospective associations between antisocial peer affiliation and externalizing disorders (antisocial...

We review the diagnostic criteria and core defining characteristics of the alcohol use disorder (AUD) phenotype and briefly characterize the epidemiology of alcohol use, problems, and disorder. We also describe the heterogeneity that exists in emergence and course of both nonspecific and alcohol-specific risk, and summarize the evidence for cross-l...

Understanding how specific genes contribute to risk for addiction remains challenging. This study tests whether childhood temperament and externalizing behavior in early adolescence account for a portion of the association between specific genetic variants and substance use problems in late adolescence. The sample consisted of 487 adolescents from...

This Handbook explores the origins, development, and course of substance use as it emerges and unfolds in adolescence. Given the large causal network involved in adolescent substance use and abuse as well as its powerful impact, both at the time of use and in terms of the long term outcomes and complications of use, the domains covered by this volu...

We explored patterns of self-reported personality trait change across late childhood through young adulthood in a sample assessed up to four times on the lower order facets of Positive Emotionality, Negative Emotionality (NEM), and Constraint (CON). Multilevel modelling analyses were used to describe both group- and individual-level change trajecto...

Background: Recent work has demonstrated the co-development of personality traits and alcohol use characteristics from early adolescence to young adulthood. Few studies, however, have tested whether alcohol use initiation impacts trajectories of personality over this time period. We examined the effect of alcohol use initiation on personality devel...

Gender differences in the prevalence of alcohol use disorder (AUD) have motivated the separate study of its risk factors and consequences in men and women. However, leveraging gender as a third variable to help account for the association between risk factors and consequences for AUD could elucidate etiological mechanisms and clinical outcomes. Usi...

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is frequently conceptualized as an extreme variant of normal personality traits. A previous study successfully developed and validated a self-report BPD measure, the Minnesota Borderline Personality Disorder Scale (MBPD). We conducted 2 studies aimed at providing further validation for this measure. Results fro...

Transmissible liability index (TLI), developed employing a high-risk design and item response theory, enables quantification of the latent trait of liability to drug use disorders (DUD) in children. TLI has been shown to have high heritability and predict DUD in young adulthood. This study extends prior research and determines the genetic contribut...

Although heritable, externalizing disorders have a number of robust associations with several environmental risk factors, including family, school and peer contexts. To account for these associations, we integrate a behavioral genetic perspective with principles of a developmental cascade theory of antisocial behavior. The major environmental conte...

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) that onsets by adolescence is associated with various deficits in psychosocial functioning. However, adolescent-onset MDD often follows a recurrent course that may drive its associated impairment. Method: To tease apart these two clinical features, we examined the relative associations of age of onset...

Objective: This study builds on previous work delineating a hierarchical model of family environmental risk in relation to a hierarchical model of externalizing disorders (EXTs) by evaluating for gene-environment interplay in these relationships. The associations between parent-child relationship quality (conflict, bonding, and management) and sub...

A dominant paradigm in psychopathology research proposes that individual differences in personality are centrally involved in the origins and manifestations of psychopathology, and structural models of personality and psychopathology have been extremely useful in helping to organize associations among many traits and disorders. However, these model...

Background Previous studies have shown that genetic risk for externalizing (EXT) disorders is greater in the context of adverse family environments during adolescence, but it is unclear whether these effects are long lasting. The current study evaluated developmental changes in gene–environment interplay in the concurrent and prospective associatio...

Women are more vulnerable to the deleterious effects of both acute and protracted alcohol use than men, but women's lower levels of alcohol consumption and alcohol use disorder (AUD) have resulted in a paucity of investigations on the development of alcohol problems in women. In particular, it is not clear to what extent the cascading effects of ke...

Background This paper presents two replications of a heuristic model for measuring environment in studies of gene-environment interplay in the etiology of young adult problem behaviors. Methods Data were drawn from two longitudinal, U.S. studies of the etiology of substance use and related behaviors: the Raising Healthy Children study (RHC; N = 1,...

The personality-related construct of behavioral disinhibition is hypothesized to confer a generalized risk for alcohol and drug dependence. On average, rates of substance use and scores on measures of disinhibition peak in adolescence and decline as people mature into adulthood. The present study investigated this developmental change by evaluating...

Utilizing the large, longitudinal Minnesota Twin Family Study (N = 2510; 96 % European American ancestry), we examined the influence of several person-environment transactions on adolescent substance abuse. We focused on the two childhood personality traits found to be most predictive of substance abuse in this sample-socialization (willingness to...

We utilized a longitudinal twin study (N = 2,510) to identify the child characteristics present prior to initiation of substance use that best predicted later substance use disorders. Two independent traits accounted for the majority of premorbid risk: socialization (conformity to rules and conventional values) and boldness (sociability and social...

Substance use is heritable, but few common genetic variants have been associated with these behaviors. Rare nonsynonymous exonic variants can now be efficiently genotyped, allowing exome-wide association tests. We identified and tested 111,592 nonsynonymous exonic variants for association with behavioral disinhibition and the use/misuse of nicotine...

Classic criminological theories emphasize the role of impaired self-control in behavioral deviancy. Reduced amplitude of the P300 brain response is reliably observed in individuals with antisocial and substance-related problems, suggesting it may serve as a neurophysiological indicator of deficiencies in self-control that confer liability to devian...

Importance Twin-family studies have shown that parent-child resemblance on substance use disorders and antisocial behavior can be accounted for by the transmission of a general liability to a spectrum of externalizing disorders. Most studies, however, include only biological parents and offspring, which confound genetic and environmental transmiss...

We report results from a genome wide association study (GWAS) of five quantitative indicators of behavioral disinhibition: nicotine, alcohol consumption, alcohol dependence, illicit drugs, and non-substance related behavioral disinhibition. The sample, consisting of 7,188 Caucasian individuals clustered in 2,300 nuclear families, was genotyped on o...

A crucial challenge in efforts to link psychological disorders to neural systems, with the aim of developing biologically informed conceptions of such disorders, is the problem of method variance (Campbell & Fiske, 1959). Since even measures of the same construct in differing domains correlate only moderately, it is unsurprising that large sample s...

The present study used an empirical, “bottom-up” approach to delineate the structure of the California Child Q-Set (CCQ), a comprehensive set of personality descriptors, in a sample of 373 preschool-aged children. This approach yielded two broad trait dimensions, Adaptive Socialization (emotional stability, compliance, intelligence) and Anxious Inh...

We used a longitudinal twin design to examine selection effects of personality traits at age 11 on high-risk environmental contexts at age 14 and the extent to which these contexts mediated risk for substance abuse at age 17. Socialization at age 11 (willingness to follow rules and endorse conventional values) predicted exposure to contextual risk...

Behavioral disinhibition is a trait hypothesized to represent a general vulnerability to the development of substance use disorders. We used a large community-representative sample (N = 7,188) to investigate the genetic and environmental relationships among measures of behavioral disinhibition, Nicotine Use/Dependence, Alcohol Consumption, Alcohol...

Objective: Cross-sectional studies have demonstrated high rates of comorbidity among substance use disorders. However, few studies have examined the developmental course of incident comorbidity and how it changes from adolescence to adulthood. The authors examine patterns of comorbidity among substance use disorders to gain insight into the effect...

We used a longitudinal twin design to examine the causal association between sexual, emotional, and physical abuse in childhood (before age 18) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) traits at age 24 using a discordant twin design and biometric modeling. Additionally, we examined the mediating and moderating effects of symptoms of childhood exte...

Although the comorbidity between borderline personality disorder (BPD) and substance abuse is well established, there are few longitudinal studies that have examined its developmental origins or whether the comorbidity is due to common genetic or environmental risk factors. To fill this gap, we used a large sample of female adolescent twins (N = 1,...

Despite the high prevalence of trauma exposure in female prisoners, few studies have examined the link between psychopathy and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-or the potential mediating role of borderline personality disorder traits. Using a sample of incarcerated women, we identified differential associations across facets of psychopathy, as...

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are highly comorbid and exhibit a relatively late onset. As such, many behaviors and personality traits present prior to the initiation of substance use can be used to predict later SUDs. The transmissible liability index (TLI) is a quantitative measure of such behaviors that indexes the common liability to SUDs. We e...

Theorists have speculated that primary psychopathy (or Factor 1 affective-interpersonal features) is prominently heritable whereas secondary psychopathy (or Factor 2 social deviance) is more environmentally determined. We tested this differential heritability hypothesis using a large adolescent twin sample. Trait-based proxies of primary and second...

To examine the reciprocal effects between the onset and course of alcohol use disorder (AUD) and normative changes in personality traits of behavioral disinhibition and negative emotionality during the transition between adolescence and young adulthood. Longitudinal-epidemiological study assessing AUD and personality at ages 17 and 24 years. Partic...

The consistent association between adolescent sexual initiation (ASI) and risky adult sexual behavior (RASB) has generally been assumed to indicate that ASI has a causal effect on RASB; consequently, it is assumed that delaying ASI will reduce RASB. Yet the ASI-RASB association might be better accounted for by some third variable. We evaluated the...

Meaning in life, spirituality, and religiousness have been empirically linked in previous research. This study aimed to advance knowledge of the interrelations among these variables by examining their heritable and non-heritable sources of influence, as well as the genetic and environmental contributions to their inter-relations. A sample of 343 mi...

Although large epidemiological data sets can inform research on the etiology and development of borderline personality disorder (BPD), they rarely include BPD measures. In some cases, however, proxy measures can be constructed using instruments already in these data sets. In this study, the authors developed and validated a self-report measure of B...