BACKGROUND Although there have been a wide range of epidemiological studies examining the impact of patterns of alcohol consumption among adolescents, there remains considerable variability in both defining these patterns and the ability to comprehensively evaluate their relationship to behavioural patterns. This study explores a new procedure for defining and evaluating drinking patterns and i...

AIMS To study the functionality of alcohol expectancies in predicting drinking behaviour in existing peer groups of young adults in a 'naturalistic' setting. DESIGN AND SETTING Young adults were invited to join an experiment with their peer group in a bar annex laboratory. During a 'break' of 50 minutes in this experiment, their activities, social behaviour and drinking behaviour were observe...

AIMS   Dual-process models imply that alcohol use is related to implicit as well as explicit cognitive processes. Few studies have tested whether both types of processes are related to ad libitum drinking. In a series of three studies, we tested whether both implicit and explicit alcohol-related cognitions predicted the amount of alcohol consumed in an ad libitum (semi)naturalistic drinking sit...

Alcohol may be used and misused for different reasons, i.e., to enhance positive affect and to cope with negative affect. These to pathways are thought to depend on two distinct and relatively stable neurobiological systems: the behavioral activation (BAS; i.e., fun seeking, drive, reward responsiveness) and behavioral inhibition (BIS) systems. This study investigates the associations of BAS an...

BACKGROUND College drinking has become a significant health issue in China; the current study addressed the gap that no prior research has investigated drinking motives among Chinese undergraduate students. OBJECTIVES This study aimed to replicate the four-factor structure of the Drinking Motives Questionnaire-Revised (DMQ-R) reported for Western populations. Additionally, the relationships b...

BACKGROUND Research indicates that brief motivational interventions are efficacious treatments for hazardous drinking. Little is known, however, about the psychological processes that may moderate intervention success. Based on growing evidence that drinking behavior may be influenced by automatic (nonvolitional) mental processes, the current study examined whether automatic alcohol-approach as...

BACKGROUND Exposure to permissive minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) laws not only affects young adults in the short term, but also later in life; for example, individuals who could legally purchase alcohol before the age of 21 are more likely to suffer from drinking problems as older adults, long after the laws had been changed. However, it is not known how permissive MLDA exposure affects spec...

We recently established that the monoamine stabilizer (-)-OSU6162 (OSU6162) decreased voluntary alcohol-mediated behaviors, including alcohol intake and cue/priming-induced reinstatement, in long-term drinking rats, while blunting alcohol-induced dopamine output in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) of alcohol-naïve rats. Therefore, we hypothesized that OSU6162 attenuates alcohol-mediated behaviors by...

BACKGROUND Parental alcohol misuse may negatively affect drinking behaviours among offspring, but it is unclear to what extent influences are gender-specific and dependent upon the actual drinking behaviour measured. The aim of this study was to investigate whether hazardous drinking among Norwegian teenage boys (N = 2538) and girls (N = 2494) was associated with paternal and maternal alcohol m...

conclusions surveys and opinion polls are valuable research tools and feedback mechanisms for administrative decisions; they should not be discredited by obtrusive questioning or asking for private information, with commercial or other purposes. context many studies on alcohol misuse and related topics such as the use of condoms are based on surveys. however, some surveys are not free from bias...