Psychology Commons^™

Evaluation Of Neurobiological Risk Factors For Alcohol Consumption; Convergent Evidence For Predispositional Effects Of Brain Volume, David Baranger

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Alcohol is one of the most widely used psychoactive substances and accounts for 5% of global disease burden. The goal of the present work is to help advance efforts to both identify prognostic markers of risk, and to understand the mechanisms by which alcohol consumption impacts health. Early life stress is one of the strongest predictors of mental illness, including alcohol dependence, and has been hypothesized to impact risk via modulation of striatal reward functions and reward learning. Studies examined the effect of stress on reward learning and processing, and tested for moderation by genetic and environmental risk. Results were …

Baked And Buzzed: Investigating The Influence Of Co-Use Of Cannabis And Alcohol On White Matter Integrity In Emerging Adults, Natasha E. Wright

Theses and Dissertations

Objective: Growing evidence suggests alcohol and cannabis use independently alter neural structure and functioning, particularly during sensitive developmental time periods such as adolescence and emerging adulthood. However, there has been minimal investigation into the effects co-occurring use of these two substances, despite preliminary evidence of unique acute and psychopharmacological changes due to using alcohol and cannabis together.

Method: Data drawn from the IDEAA Consortium was utilized to assess white matter integrity as measured by FreeSurfer’s TRACULA in emerging adults (n=192; 16-27 years old). Timeline Follow-Back was used to calculate past month cannabis use, alcohol use, co-use days, binge alcohol episode, …

College Student Alcohol Use And Engagement In Prevention Programming, Alexis H. Branch, Shimona Kumar, Christina Mcgrath

Undergraduate Research Posters

Social problems and adverse consequences have been associated with risky alcohol use (Paschall et al, 2015). Personalized Normative Feedback (PNF) has been utilized to address these problems (White and Hingson, 2014) by comparing students’ alcohol use to campus or national norms (Butler et al, 2009). The current investigation sought to understand differences in alcohol use behaviors in freshmen who did and did not report completion of a personalized feedback intervention (PFI) in a diverse sample of college students from the Spit for Science (S4S) project. S4S is a campus-wide, longitudinal study on the genetic and environmental factors that contribute to …