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、暴饮暴食和无保护措施的性行为。除了性传播疾病和肥胖等行为对健康的负面影响外，这种危险行为还会给社会带来巨大的经济代价。例如，酒后驾车每年给美国公众造成的损失超过1000亿美元，其中包括金钱成本和生活质量损失，其中大部分成本由酒后驾车者以外的人承担。除了健康和经济成本，情绪健康也要付出代价，比如醉酒后的悔恨、内疚或羞耻。如果我们想通过针对性地饮酒来预防或减少这些负面后果，我们就必须了解酒精？S在危险行为中的作用。传统智慧认为，酒精会使人们对周围的风险视而不见，基于这一前提，人们已经花费了数百万美元来创建教育项目。然而，科学证据并不明确地支持传统观点。一些研究表明，人们在醉酒时理解风险信息的能力不亚于清醒时，人们甚至可能在醉酒时寻找或发现风险中的一些内在价值。如果传统模式是错误的，那么许多现有的课程会浪费时间和金钱，甚至可能会危及那些认为这种策略将帮助他们避免负面情况的人的生命，从而未能采取更有效的预防措施。这项研究项目测试了酒精影响高风险决策机制的另一个模型，重点是当人们同时考虑醉酒和清醒时不同情况下的风险和好处时，涉及的情绪和动机过程。我们探索了几种通常与饮酒有关的不同类型的行为，包括性行为、食物选择和人际谈判。如果我们的结果表明，酒精会改变人们对有吸引力的选择的渴望程度，从而导致危险行为，而不是影响人们？S有能力理解与该选择相关的风险，那么我们建议教育项目从强调风险转向新的关注削弱好处。

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.