Investigating the relationship between socio-economic status and hazardous drinking: Effects of stress, impulsivity, gender and ethnicity.

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In the UK, there is a great public health concern surrounding alcohol, with approximately 20% of the population regularly consuming alcohol at hazardous levels. If people continue to misuse alcohol over long-periods of time, this can be severely damaging to health.There are several predictive factors of hazardous drinking, for example, people of lower socio-economic status (SES) tend to drink more hazardously when compared to those of higher SES. One theory, the social causation approach, suggests that having a lower SES exposes people to a greater level of stress and adversity and in turn, drives individuals to consume more alcohol. Research has highlighted stress as a risk factor for alcohol misuse within both healthy social drinkers and hazardous drinkers. Furthermore, the effect of stress increasing alcohol craving and consumption has been found to be modulated by underlying personality traits, such as impulsivity. In other words, those with higher levels of impulsivity tend to crave and consume more alcohol following stress than those who are less impulsive.Advanced /Specialist Skills, e.g. Interview skills, use of ESRC datasetsProgramming capability,including the capability to design and execute psychological experiments using PsychoPy and PsyToolKit; Publishing, I published the data from my undergraduate (Clay et al., 2018, Drug and Alcohol Dependence) and Masters (Clay & Parker, 2018, Submitted to Psychopharmacology) projects, acting as first author.The overarching aim of this programme of study is to further our understanding of the relationship between SES and hazardous drinking through the exploration of several psychological (e.g. personality traits), physiological (e.g. stress response) and social (e.g. gender and ethnicity) factors. In doing so we will be able to make better informed decisions regarding current and future legislation surrounding alcohol use, which attempts to address the present public health concerns.