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L Southwick

Publications and source records attributed to L Southwick.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Restrained drinking: risk factor for problems with alcohol?

A seven-item Drinking Restraint Scale (DRS) has been developed which indicates that a style of alcohol consumption, equivalent in a number of ways to the style of food consumption termed eating restraint, may exist. Several hypothesized relationships between DRS scores and other drinking-related measures were confirmed. A restrained drinking style was associated with: more extreme patterns of alcohol consumption; a higher proportion of drinking occasions that result in intoxication; more external styles of alcohol consumption control; and more alcohol-related negative consequences. The latter three relationships were found even when heavy drinkers were excluded from the analysis, which suggests that these relationships are not dependent on a heavy drinking pattern. These findings encourage continued investigation of drinking restraint as a risk factor for developing problems with alcohol.

Adolescent↗

Alcohol and social behavior I: The psychology of drunken excess.

Drinking alcohol clearly has important effect on social behaviors, such as increasing aggression, self-disclosure, sexual adventuresomeness, and so on. Research has shown that these effects can stem from beliefs we hold about alcohol effects. Less is known about how alcohol itself affects these behaviors. A cognitive explanation, that alcohol impairs the information processing needed to inhibit response impulses--the abilities to foresee negative consequences of the response, to recall inhibiting standards, and so on--has begun to emerge. We hypothesize that alcohol impairment will make a social response more extreme or excessive when the response is pressured by both inhibiting and instigating cues--in our terms, when it is under inhibitory response conflict. In that case, alcohol's damage to inhibitory processing allows instigating pressures more sway over the response, increasing its extremeness. In the present meta-analysis, each published test of alcohol's effect on a social, or socially significant behavior was rated (validated against independent judges) as to whether it was under high or low inhibitory conflict. Over low-conflict tests, intoxicated subjects behaved only a tenth of a standard deviation more extremely than their sober controls, whereas over high-conflict tests they were a full standard deviation more extreme. The effect of conflict increased with alcohol dosage, was shown not to be mediated by drinking expectancies, and generalized with few exceptions across the 34 studies and 12 social behaviors included in this analysis.

Cognition↗