A new study finds that the personality of children in the first five years of their life may help predict whether or not they'll be prone to drinking alcohol during their teenage years.

"People don't enter adolescence as blank slates; they have a history of life experiences that they bring with them, dating back to early childhood," said Danielle Dick, a psychologist from at Virginia Commonwealth University in the US and a co-author of the study. "This is one of the most comprehensive attempts to understand very early childhood predictors of adolescent alcohol use in a large epidemiological cohort."

Dick and her team used data from the UK's Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a large epidemiological sample of pregnant women with delivery dates between April 1991 and December 1992. Temperamental characteristics were assessed at six time points from six months to nearly six years of age on 6,504 boys and 6,143 girls. Alcohol use and problems were assessed at age 15.5 years.

The traits that most correlated with alcohol use during teenage years included two sides of the spectrum: emotional instability and low sociability or, on the other hand, a degree of extroversion that often leads to "sensation seeking" later in life. "This indicates very different pathways to alcohol involvement/patterns that emerge early on, which has important implications for prevention efforts," Dick said.

"This underscores the fact that drinking during adolescence is largely a social phenomenon," she added. "However, this doesn't mean it's less problematic; we know from other studies that most adolescent drinking is high risk -- for example, binge drinking -- and can lead to numerous negative consequences."

Prior research has correlated personality traits and alcohol but mostly bases that data on adolescents, because that is when kids start to drink, LiveScience reports. While other studies have tracked trends starting from birth, this study includes the broadest and most comprehensive range of factors to date, the website notes.

The study was published online July 10 in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.