Saturday, April 5, 2025
4/5/2025
Innovative Physiological Predictors of College Binge Drinking - Project Summary College binge drinking is a significant public health problem that has been associated with injury, assault, unsafe sex, academic problems, alcohol dependence, drunk driving, and even death. In order to prevent and treat college binge drinking, it is important to better understand factors that may lead students to consume alcohol in this fashion. Converging lines of evidence suggest that participants’ behavioral and physiological reactions to alcohol cues (i.e., cue-reactivity) contribute to alcohol consumption and loss of inhibitory control over a drinking episode. Alcohol cues in the environment may lead college students to crave and seek alcohol, while impaired inhibitory control may allow the drinking episode to escalate into a binge. These factors have largely been measured under controlled laboratory conditions, but new innovations such as continuous transdermal alcohol biosensors and ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) provide a unique opportunity to examine correlations between life and lab. The proposed study is designed to address these issues through a single laboratory assessment of cue-reactivity and inhibitory control via event-related potentials, followed by a 12-day field phase with alcohol biosensor monitoring plus EMAs. This design will allow us not only to capture the events leading up to a natural binge drinking episode, but also to model the underlying causal processes of binge drinking by combining laboratory and field measurements. Results of this study could provide new targets for real-time interventions for college binge drinking and could ultimately be applied to the development of cognitive bias modification programs for the treatment and prevention of excessive alcohol consumption on college campuses. Undergraduate student researchers at Texas State University will be involved in all aspects of the proposed project, providing them with firsthand experience in cutting-edge addiction research and encouraging continued education and employment in health-related fields.
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