This application requests five years of support to investigate the incentive-motivational and cognitive processes underlying the association between behavioral disinhibition and early-onset alcohol problems. In addition, the study investigates potential psychosocial processes that distinguish early-onset alcoholism without antisocial problems from antisocial early- onset alcoholism. The project takes a theoretically based, multifactorial perspective (model) on the mechanisms that influence behavior disinhibition in subjects with early-onset alcoholism. This model describes the roles for individual differences in sensitivity to rewards and punishments, working memory capacity, signal saliency, and executive cognitive function in the processes affecting behavioral disnihibition in antisocial early-onset alcoholism.
The first aim of this project is to investigate the roles that working memory capacity, sensitivity to punishments and rewards, and signal saliency play in modulating behavioral inhibition and activation in antisocial and non-antisocial early-onset alcoholism. Responses to rewards and punishments are assessed on different incentive- motivational tasks that tap different processes that affect behavioral disinhibition, such as passive avoidance learning on a series of go/ no go tasks, the influence of magnitude of rewards and punishments on decision making, and the discounting of future versus present rewards. Tasks involve the manipulation of reward and punishment saliency and the manipulation of type of punishment to assess specific disinhibitory mechanisms.
The second aim of this project is to investigate the psychosocial mechanisms, such as affiliation with college fraternities/sororities, planful excessive drinking in social contexts, and having difficulties with difficulties with development transitions, that distinguish non antisocial alcoholism from antisocial alcoholism. The result of this study should (1) provide valuable information about the mechanisms that serve to predispose to, and maintain, early onset alcohol problems, and (2) serve to inform prevention and treatment efforts for early onset alcohol problems.
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