Deterring hospital patients from ‘drinking’ from hand sanitizers – Dr. Weiner’s solution

Aside from causing the occasional fire, alcohol-based hand santizers in hospitals have another problem. They’re a handy ‘non-beverage’ source of (jellified) alcohol for those patients who crave intoxication. There are several published formal investigations on the subject – see, for example : Consumption of alcohol-based hand sanitisers by hospital inpatients The Medical journal of Australia […]

The first public corpus of alcoholized German speech

Collectors of alcoholized German speech, rejoice! A new corpus is available to you: “Alcohol Language Corpus. The first public corpus of alcoholized German speech,” Florian Schiel [pictured here], Christian Heinrich, and Sabine Barfüßer, Language Resources and Evaluation, 2011. The authors, at the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, explain: “The Alcohol Language Corpus (ALC) […]

Drink | drunk | hungover (studies)

Scenario: You’re on holiday. You drink heavily. What are the factors that might contribute towards a hangover? Such a question was asked by researchers Morten Hesse and Sébastien Tutenges of the University of Aarhus, Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Copenhagen Division, Denmark, who performed a 2010 observational prospective study with a total of 112 […]

Drunk philosophers, studied in a bar in France

Ig Nobel Prize winner Laurent Bègue and colleague Aaron Duke have a new study about the effect of drunkenness on philosophy. The study is: “The drunk utilitarian: Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas,” Aaron A. Duke and Laurent Bègue, Cognition, 134 (2015): 121-127. The 2013 Ig Nobel Prize for psychology was awarded to Laurent […]

Partially drunk people can appear more attractive

There’s yet another twist in research news about drunkenness and the perception of beauty. The 2013 Ig Nobel psychology prize was awarded to Laurent Bègue [FRANCE], Brad Bushman [USA, UK, the NETHERLANDS, POLAND], Oulmann Zerhouni [FRANCE], Baptiste Subra [FRANCE], and Medhi Ourabah [FRANCE], for confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they […]