This sociology study explains that alcohol helps young people make friends “Alcohol and the Constitution of Friendship for Young Adults,” Sarah MacLean [pictured here], Sociology, epub January 22, 2015. (Thanks to Trey Deitch for bringing this to our attention.) The author, at the University of Melbourne, reports: “This article examines alcohol as a technology in contemporary young […]
Tag: drinking
How many drinks does it take you to feel drunk?
The answer, it seems, depends on many factors. Gender for example, and also when you ask(ed) the drinkers. A report in the journal Addiction, (Volume 101, Issue 10, pages 1428–1437, October 2006) examined the 1979, 1995 and 2000 US National Alcohol Surveys, and found that : “The mean reported number of drinks to feel drunk […]
Insatiable Birdies of the Second Kind
A new variant of the famous ‘Drinking Bird’ has been developed at Kent State University, Ohio, US. But first, some background on the the ‘Drinking Bird’ a.k.a. the ‘Insatiable Birdie’ … A version [* see note below] of the ‘novelty device’ first received a US patent in 1946, inspiring many to endeavour to explain how […]
A medical study the entire family can enjoy
This is a medical study the entire family can enjoy, one way and another: “Effect of maternal coffee, smoking and drinking behavior on adult son’s semen quality,” P.M. Cirillo, B.A. Cohn, N.Y. Krigbaum, M. Lee, C. Brazil, and Pam Factor-Litvak [pictured here], Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, vol. 2, no. 6, 2011, pp. 375-386. […]
PR Headline of the Week: “Heavy Drinking Is Bad for Marriage if One Spouse Drinks, but Not Both”
This week’s Press Release Headline of the Week waves atop a press release issued by the University of Buffalo. It says: Heavy Drinking Is Bad for Marriage if One Spouse Drinks, but Not Both Beneath the banner lies the story of a breakthrough in the difficult academic field called “Addiction Studies”. The lead researcher, Kenneth […]
The Glass is Half Held-Against-You: The imbibing idiot bias
The imbibing idiot bias. That’s what this study is all about. The imbibing idiot bias: “The imbibing idiot bias: Consuming alcohol can be hazardous to your (perceived) intelligence,” Scott I. Rick and Maurice E. Schweitzer, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Volume 23, Issue 2, April 2013, Pages 212–219. (Thanks to investigator Neil Martin for bringing this to […]
Further doses of research about drinking booze
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 […]
What One Learns By Studying Studies about Drinking
To answer the question, What happens when people drink alcohol? one can read through thousands of research studies published in respected scholarly journals. One must look a bit harder to answer a different question: What, exactly, did some of those researchers hope to learn by doing that research? Let’s take a quick hop through the literature in one […]
Scientists Observe Confirmed Case of “Social Drinking”
Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh announce they’ve discovered that drinking in a social setting can increase people’s positive emotions, and help those people bond. According to the researchers, earlier studies purporting to examine this topic looked at so-called “social drinkers” when they drank alone; this study actually put social drinkers in a social setting, and found […]
Intoxicated assumptions
Today’s classroom exercise is to [1] read this snippet from a psychology paper, then [2] identify all the assumptions that the authors make about what people think about, then [3] ask yourself if you believe those assumptions. The paper is “What Men Want: The Role of Reflective Opposite-Sex Normative Preferences in Alcohol Use Among College […]