No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Social anxiety is widely thought to be positively associated with alcohol use. However, these studies rely primarily on self-report of drinking behavior. This research aimed to further explore this research by assessing blood alcohol concentration (BAC), a physiological measure of alcohol intoxication, as the dependent measure in naturalistic settings (i.e., fraternity parties). Results from Study 1 suggest a weak relationship between self-reported anxiety levels and BAC. Study 2 was based on Burke and Stephen's (1999) proposed social cognitive model in which alcohol expectancies and drink-refusal self-efficacy act as moderators of the relationship between dispositional social anxiety and alcohol consumption. Analyses (n=86) did not support a relationship between social anxiety and alcohol use, nor the moderating effects of alcohol expectancies and drink-refusal self-efficacy. Implications for this type of research and possible future directions are discussed. / Master of Science

Approximately 14,500 people were killed in traffic crashes where the driver was legally intoxicated in 2005, constituting 33% of all traffic fatalities that year. While social efforts to reduce the number of traffic fatalities have shown to be moderately successful, alcohol has remained a factor in 40% of all traffic deaths over the past decade. Transdermal ethanol detection is a promising method that could prevent drunk driving if integrated into an ignition interlock system; potentially preventing 90 million drunk driving trips a year in the US. However, experimental data from previous research has shown significant time delays between alcohol ingestion and detection at the skin which makes real time estimation of blood alcohol concentration via skin measurement difficult. Using a validated model we studied the effects that body weight, metabolic rate and ethanol dose had on the time lag between the blood alcohol concentration and transdermal alcohol concentration. The dose of alcohol ingested was found to have the most significant effect on the skin alcohol lag time. Additionally, custom transdermal ethanol sensors were designed and fabricated and a pilot study on human subjects was conducted to determine if inexpensive transdermal ethanol sensors could be used to detect alcohol in drivers. / Master of Science

No description available.

Driving under the influence of alcohol is one of the biggest public health problems in the United States. A number of theories exist as to why people drive after drinking, one of the dominant being that they believe that they are not legally intoxicated. The purpose of the present study is to determine if people tend to accurately estimate the number of alcoholic beverages they can consume before reaching a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .08 percent. Participants consisted of27 college students. Results showed a significant difference between the participants' estimated number of drinks and the actual number of drinks as determined by a Virtual Bar program. This virtual bar delivery system calculates BAC based on gender, weight, and number of drinks in a given time. Links to past research and theory are presented.

The research reported is concerned with the effects of alcohol on a maze-based task which had been designed to incorporate independently each of the four behavioral processes described by Berliner, Angell, and Shearer in 1968. Such a design allows study of the relative effects of alcohol on various behavioral domains. This type of . comparison had not been previously accomplished in a single study. Further, if a task can be characterized according to the behavioral dimensions of which it is comprised and alcohol levels at which performance of the task is likely to occur can be postulated, regression equations might be of use in estimating performance decrements on the task under alcohol versus no-alcohol conditions without experimental manipulation. The development of such regression equations is a second aim of this experiment. Thirty-two subjects (16 of each gender) were given four different alcohol doses (0.00, 0.05, 0.07, and 0.09% BAC) coupled with four levels of maze difficulty. A Latin Square strategy was used to assign the BAC/Maze combinations. Each combination was repeated under speed and accuracy instructions. Analyses of variance showed that alcohol impaired performance on (most independent variables in each of the behavioral domains. However, comparisons of estimated percent differences in performance across the dimensions revealed that the cognitive processes were most impaired by alcohol while the perceptual processes were most resistant to alcohol effects. Analyses of variance also indicated that there were no performance effects attributable to gender but that maze difficulty and instruction generally affected performance in the expected directions. Regression equations which incorporated alcohol, instruction, and ratings of the contribution of each behavioral process were developed to predict task completion time. Gender did not enter into these equations. The predictions yielded by these equations are in agreement with the results found in the literature. Hence, they are satisfactory for use in estimating performance decrements due to alcohol on a task the behavioral components of which are known or can be measured. / Ph. D. / incomplete_metadata

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Alkoholens påverkan på människor är vida känt och intresset för attityden till bakrus på arbetsplatser uppkom som en fortsättning av en studie som visade att alkoholkonsumtionen var mer utpräglat inom Handels men mindre i Vård och Omsorg. Syftet med den här studien var att se om attityden till bakrus på arbetsplatser skiljde sig åt och om Handels är mer accepterande till bakrus än Vård och Omsorg. Det användes en enkät med attitydskalor som skulle mäta attityd till bakrus och den delades ut på utvalda omvårdnads-boenden och butiker i Uppland, totalt svarade 103 personer på enkäten. Resultatet visade på en skillnad avseende attityder till medarbetare som kommit bakfulla till arbetet för de olika yrkeskategorierna. Personal inom handels var mer accepterande till bakrus på arbetsplatser än inom Vård och Omsorg. Ett förslag till framtida studier är att forska i om det finns ett samband mellan en faktisk alkoholkonsumtion och attityder till rus/bakrus bland medarbetare på arbetsplatser.