Author: Alex Thompson

Associations Between Socioeconomic Factors and Alcohol Outcomes PMC

Avenues Recovery is a community-based drug and alcohol rehabilitation center with locations across the United States. If you’re a recovering alcoholic, it’s best to avoid activities and environments that revolve around alcohol. This is especially true during the early months of your sobriety when you are the most vulnerable.

Some programmers have been rumored to hook themselves up to alcohol-filled IV drips in hopes of hovering at the curve’s apex for an extended time. In 2012, Slingerland and several scholars in other fields won a big grant to study religion from an evolutionary perspective. In the years since, they have argued that religion helped humans cooperate on a much larger scale than they had as hunter-gatherers.

1. Individual differences in the socially reinforcing effects of alcohol also may relate to genetic makeup, and testing alcohol’s effects in a social context may be a powerful approach to uncover genetic vulnerability to alcoholism (Fromme et al., 2004; Volkow & Li, 2004).
2. However, studies have found that focusing only on changing social norms is insufficient, and that broader interventions that influence multiple levels of an individual’s environment, such as family and schools, may have greater impact.
3. Alcohol use increases with the number of online peer ties and greater peer density, a measure of interconnectedness in the social network (Cook et al. 2013).
4. The group formation project also permitted examination of genetic moderators on alcohol’s effects in a social context.
5. The concept has only become more expanded and popular with the restriction on movement.

Even if you’re not planning a night where you’re going to get drunk, it’s considered socially acceptable to have a beer or two or a glass of wine with dinner when you’re hanging out with friends. Other effects of alcohol may include improper liver function and cirrhosis, cancer of the mouth, throat, breast, liver, and esophagus, and a weakened immune system. Rorabaugh argued that this longing for oblivion resulted from America’s almost unprecedented pace of change between 1790 and 1830. The resulting epidemics of loneliness and anxiety, he concluded, led people to numb their pain with alcohol.

His early studies used a low dose of alcohol and the balanced placebo factorial design that had been popularized by Marlatt (e.g., Marlatt, Deming, & Reed, 1973), in which ethanol content and instructions regarding the alcohol content of the beverage were orthogonally manipulated. Rather than ruling out the possibility that alcohol ingestion (e.g., at more moderate doses) could affect anxiety, these studies were pivotal for underscoring the position that comprehensive accounts of drinking ought to account for more than simply pharmacological effects of ethanol consumption. More recently, there has been interest in integrating pharmacological and expectancy factors. For instance, tension-reducing expectancies are more likely to be endorsed while blood alcohol levels are at peak than while they are dropping (Kushner et al., 2000).

Family and Peer Influences on Adolescent and Young Adult Drinking

I was most inspired, though, by his willingness to allow the data to inform our positions, even in cases in which new results did not support the findings of his earlier studies. While our group formation interaction generally [though not entirely (see Fairbairn et al., 2013)] elicited positive experiences, group research introducing manipulations that might permit shifts in the affective tone of the interaction would offer varied social contexts for examining the impact of alcohol. Social learning theory is rarely mentioned in current studies examining the impact of acute alcohol administration on emotion. Yet the key points of emphasis brought to the fore during the 1970s and 1980s have been swallowed whole.

The traditional gap between the laboratory and clinic lamented by Wilson (1987b) remains today, yet there is reason to hope that recent theory development and data acquisition regarding the effects of alcohol on emotion offer prospects for an improved translation of research into practice. Fairbairn and Sayette (2014) recently outlined a social attributional framework for examining the impact of alcohol on social anxiety, and on emotion more generally. Based on principles of stability and internal/external causality from attribution theory (Heider, 1958; Rotter, 1966; Weiner, 1985), this approach proposes that alcohol’s effects are largely explained by its tendency to free individuals from preoccupation with social rejection, allowing them to access social rewards.

Immigration-Related Influences

In other words, although people with lower SES may be less likely to drink and may be consuming less alcohol overall, they are more negatively affected by its effects. Findings to date suggest that economic disparities and their secondary effects are moderating the relationship between alcohol use and the experience of negative alcohol-related consequences; however, the exact nature of these complex relationships requires further exploration. However, if you engage in social drinking multiple times a week, this can give way to increased tolerance and a desire to drink more. Education is vital, so people don’t put themselves at risk of developing an alcohol use disorder.

The DRD4 genotype pertains to gene × environment interactions involving alcohol-related traits (Larsen et al., 2010). For instance, Park, Sher, Todorov, and Heath (2011) found college/Greek involvement to predict increased risk of alcohol dependence, but only among students with at least one copy of the 7-repeat allele. This research raises questions regarding the mechanisms by which social factors increase risk for problematic drinking among 7-repeat carriers (Park et al., 2011; see also; Mrug & Windle, 2014). While the elusive “alcoholic personality” has been discussed for decades (see Sher et al., 1999), interest in this topic has grown in recent years. With the design of longitudinal studies that overcame many of the methodological limitations of early cross-sectional research, a set of core personality traits began to emerge that appeared to relate to alcoholism (see Sher et al., 1999).

No matter what form of alcohol you drink, if you have trouble cutting down or stopping and your drinking has negative consequences in your life, you likely have a problem with alcohol. For example, if someone calls themselves a moderate drinker and is sticking to the accepted public health definition of moderate drinking, they will not consume more than 2 drinks per day if they are an adult male, and not more than 1 drink per day if they’re an adult female. Despite these challenges, it is important to develop new strategies to systematically examine the impact of advertising and marketing on alcohol use among different populations.

There is no set amount of alcohol that determines a social drinker, but the CDC characterizes alcohol use as moderate drinking if a female consumes one drink per day, or a male consumes two drinks per day. This becomes binge drinking if a male consumes five or more drinks, or a female drinks 4 or more drinks during a general two-hour time frame on at least one occasion within a month. J. Rorabaugh painstakingly calculated the stunning amount of alcohol early Americans drank on a daily basis. In 1830, when American liquor consumption hit its all-time high, the average adult was going through more than nine gallons of spirits each year. Most of this was in the form of whiskey (which, thanks to grain surpluses, was sometimes cheaper than milk), and most of it was drunk at home.

How To Drink Responsibly?

Around the same time, Slingerland published a social-science-heavy self-help book called Trying Not to Try. In it, he argued that the ancient Taoist concept of wu-wei (akin to what we now call “flow”) could help with both the demands of modern life and the more eternal challenge of dealing with other people. Intoxicants, he pointed out in passing, offer a chemical shortcut to wu-wei—by suppressing our conscious mind, they can unleash creativity and also make us more sociable.

4. Attention-allocation

Although the alcohol industry claims that its marketing strategies target adults ages 21–29, products like flavored alcoholic beverages remain attractive to younger drinkers. This article reviews some of the cultural and social influences on alcohol use and places individual alcohol use within the contexts and environments where people live and interact. This is not an exhaustive review but aims to show the wide range of contexts that may shape alcohol use. 4Subsequent research by Wilson and colleagues that used more moderate doses of alcohol than in the earlier studies by Wilson and Abrams (1977; Abrams & Wilson, 1979) also failed to observe expectancy effects (e.g., Sayette, Breslin, Rosenblum, & Wilson, 1994).

Signs Your “Social Drinking” May Actually Be Alcoholism

Certainly subsequent research has continued to point to complex relations between alcohol and emotion. Yet so too has real progress been made identifying particular circumstances in which individuals will generally find relief or reward from drinking alcohol. Recent studies also are gaining traction identifying individual difference factors that moderate these emotional effects on alcohol.