Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: The Bacchus Effect: A Mechanism to Explain Risky Choice Under Intoxication

饮酒与危险行为有关，如鲁莽驾驶、暴饮暴食和无保护的性行为。除了这些行为对健康的负面影响，如性传播疾病和肥胖之外，这种危险行为还会给社会带来巨大的经济代价。例如，酒驾每年给美国公众造成超过1000亿美元的损失，其中包括货币成本和生活质量损失，其中大部分成本由酒驾以外的人承担。除了健康和经济成本之外，情感健康也有成本，比如醉酒后的后悔、内疚或羞愧感。如果我们想通过针对酒精使用来预防或减少这些负面结果，我们必须了解酒精？S在危险行为中的作用。传统观点认为，酒精会让人对周围的风险视而不见，基于这一前提，数百万美元的税款被用于创建教育项目。然而，科学证据并不明确地支持传统观点。一些研究表明，人们在喝醉时对风险信息的理解能力并不亚于清醒时，人们甚至可能在喝醉时寻找或发现风险的某些内在价值。如果传统模式是错误的，那么许多现有的课程就会浪费时间和金钱，甚至可能危及那些相信这些策略将帮助他们避免消极情况的人的生命，从而无法采取更有效的预防措施。该研究项目测试了酒精影响风险决策机制的另一种模型，重点关注人们在喝醉和清醒时考虑不同情况下的风险和收益时所涉及的情感和动机过程。我们探讨了几种通常与饮酒有关的不同行为，包括性行为、食物选择和人际谈判。如果我们的研究结果表明，酒精是通过改变人们对有吸引力的选择的渴望程度而导致冒险行为，而不是影响人们？那么我们就会建议教育项目从强调风险转向关注损害利益。

Alcohol use is associated with risky behaviors, such as reckless driving, binge eating, and unprotected sex. In addition to the negative health effects of these behaviors, such as sexually transmitted diseases and obesity, there are significant economic costs to society of such risky behavior. For example, drunk driving costs the American public over 100 billion dollars annually, including monetary costs and lost quality of life, with the majority of this cost borne by people other than the drunk driver. Beyond health and financial costs, there are also costs to emotional well-being, such as the regret, guilt or shame felt after drunken behavior. If we want to prevent or reduce these negative outcomes by targeting alcohol use, we must understand alcohol?s role in risky behavior.Conventional wisdom holds that alcohol blinds people to the risks around them, and many millions of tax dollars have been spent to create educational programs based on this premise. The scientific evidence, however, does not unambiguously support the conventional view. Some research has shown that people are no less able to understand risk information when they are drunk than when they are sober and people may even seek out or find some intrinsic value in risk when drunk. If the conventional model is wrong, then many existing curricula waste time and money, and may even risk the lives of those who believe that such strategies will help them to avoid negative situations, and thus fail to take more effective precautions. This research project tests an alternative model of the mechanism by which alcohol affects risky decisions, focusing on emotional and motivational processes involved when people consider both the risks and the benefits of different situations when they are drunk versus when they are sober. We explore several different kinds of behaviors that are commonly linked to alcohol use, including sexual behavior, food choices, and interpersonal negotiation. If our results show that alcohol leads to risky behavior by changing how much people want an attractive option, rather than affecting people?s ability to understand the risks associated with that option, then we would recommend that educational programs switch from highlighting risks to a new focus on undermining benefits.