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Biomedical subjects

B Critchlow

Publications and source records attributed to B Critchlow.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1987

A utility analysis of drinking.

In a study applying a utility analysis to drinking behavior, a questionnaire on beliefs about the effects of alcohol and the desirability of those effects was administered to a sample of college students and a sample drawn from the population. Measures of the expected utility of drinking were calculated. Utility scores were positively related to drinking habits, due to heavier drinkers' increased expectations of positive consequences of drinking and more positive evaluation of all consequences. It is suggested that studies on expectancies about drinking should include not only measures of behavioral expectations but measures of the desirability of alcohol effects.

Adult↗
PubMed1985

Alcohol and social behavior II: the helpful drunkard.

Can alcohol make people more helpful, and if so, how? We hypothesized that alcohol would increase helping when, if the person were sober, the helping response would be under high inhibitory conflict--that is, when it would be affected by strong instigating and inhibiting pressures. Alcohol's damage to inhibitory processing should then allow instigating pressures to have more influence on the response, increasing helping. We expected that under low inhibitory conflict, when either or both of these response pressures would be weak under sobriety, alcohol would have little effect on helping. In two experiments we examined this reasoning. In Study 1, a mild dose of alcohol increased helping among high-conflict subjects pressured to help with a task they did not like, but did not increase helping among low-conflict subjects who either liked the task or were weakly pressured to help. In Study 2, a somewhat stronger dose of alcohol increased helping among all high-conflict subjects pressured to help with an undesirable task, yet again had no effect among low-conflict subjects weakly pressured to help. These studies provided an experimental demonstration of the role of inhibitory response conflict in mediating alcohol's social effects, and show that this process generalizes to prosocial behavior. Additional evidence from both experiments helped to rule out alternative explanations concerning drinking expectancies, alcohol's ability to enhance mood, and its ability to make the task more bearable.

Conflict, Psychological↗
PubMed1981

Dissonance and alcohol: drinking your troubles away.

Based on recent evidence supporting the assumption that cognitive dissonance is experienced as an unpleasant emotional state, and further evidence pertaining to the effects of drinking alcohol, it was predicted that among social drinkers, dissonance arousal would increase the amount of drinking and that drinking, in turn, would reduce dissonance and subsequent attitude change. This hypothesis was tested in the first two experiments by having subjects taste rate different brands of an alcoholic beverage--ostensibly to test taste discrimination but in fact to measure the amount of drinking--immediately after dissonance was aroused by having them write a counterattitudinal essay. The effect of drinking on dissonance reduction was assessed by measuring subjects' postattitudes immediately after the drinking task. Both experiments found that although dissonance arousal had little effect on the amount of drinking, whatever drinking occurred was sufficient to eliminate dissonance-reducing attitude change. The second experiment further established that these results occurred for light as well as heavy social drinkers. Evidence that the dissonance-reducing effect of drinking resulted form some effect of drinking alcohol was provided by the finding, in the second and third experiments, that neither water or coffee drinking was sufficient to eliminate attitude change in this paradigm. Both the practical and theoretical implications are discussed. The practical implication is that some forms of alcohol abuse may evolve through the reinforcement of drinking as a means of reducing dissonance; the theoretical implication is that dissonance may be frequently reduced through behaviors that ameliorate the feelings of dissonance without involving cognitive change.

Adult↗