America, a rich source of alcohol, of alcoholics, and of aggressive alcoholics, is also rich in scholarship on those subjects. One must drink deep of that scholarship, in many cases, if one cares about the question: what, exactly, did some of those researchers hope to learn by doing that research? Last week, I wrote about some examples. Here are more.
In a 1999 study called The Effects of a Cumulative Alcohol Dosing Procedure on Laboratory Aggression in Women and Men, Donald Dougherty [pictured here] and colleagues at the University of Texas-Houston medical school report making several discoveries: (1) Both men and women became more aggressive after they drank alcohol; (2) those men and women became even more aggressive “after consuming the second alcoholic drink”; (3) their aggressiveness “remained elevated for several hours” after they finished drinking; and (4) the individuals who were most aggressive when sober were also the most aggressive when drunk….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.
BONUS: A headline from yesterday’s US News & World Report: “College Students Who Binge Drink Say They’re Happier“