Young Adult Alcohol Consumption & Binge Drinking
Young adults experience more violence than other age groups, with bars and clubs being the setting of the most severe violence for young men, and young women tending to encounter the most severe violence in the home. Drs. Brian M. Quigley and Kenneth E. Leonard report that in both environments, intoxicated aggression appears to be provoked by personality differences among people and by characteristics of the triggering situations. Permissive atmospheres in bars increase the probability of intoxicated aggression, and the more alcohol consumed, the greater the likelihood of injury. In domestic violence situations, alcohol use by the husband is predictive of severe violence only in marriages already high in conflict. Many important questions about the relationship between alcohol and violence await further study. Does alcohol reduce a person’s attention to information that would inhibit aggression, as some have hypothesized? Does alcohol have pharmacological effects on decision making in conflict situations that could contribute to violent outcomes? How does alcohol affect people with specific personality traits such as anger and impulsiveness? More information on these questions is needed so that effective prevention and treatment efforts can be developed.
As young people make the transition from their late teens to adulthood, their drinking practices may follow a variety of tracks, or trajectories. Some young adults will establish lifelong patterns of alcohol use. Others may engage in a particular pattern of alcohol use in their late teen or young adult years that later changes course. Still others may never engage in drinking or heavy drinking. Generally, people increase the amounts they drink as they progress through their early twenties, and decrease their drinking when they take on adult roles. In this article, Drs. Jennifer L. Maggs and John E. Schulenberg describe both the average (or normative) pattern of alcohol use among young adults and the various subgroups of people whose drinking patterns follow different trajectories. They maintain that by identifying common trajectories of alcohol use during the transition to adulthood, researchers can gain a better understanding of how alcohol use disorders originate and evolve, how different trajectories lead to different outcomes, and how to plan prevention, diagnosis, and intervention. After peaking when young people are about 22 years old, heavy drinking rates among both college students and their nonstudent age-mates decline steadily, probably in response to the new roles and responsibilities that come with adulthood. Dr. Patrick M. O'Malley describes key transitions to adulthood and how they are associated either with increased drinking or with maturing out of alcohol use.
The first major change, moving out of the parental home, often coincides with increasing rates of heavy drinking among many young people, whether they attend college or not. College students then may be exposed to campus social environments that sometimes encourage excessive drinking. As adult responsibilities such as employment, marriage, and parenthood mount, problematic drinking declines, partly because of the limitations these responsibilities place on social activities in general and because of changes in young adults attitudes toward drinking. Young alcohol users who would be diagnosed as alcohol dependent may be less affected by the more stabilizing, socializing effects of marriage and parenthood because of personality characteristics that make them less attracted to these choices, or because their drinking behavior is less susceptible to such influences.
Several decades of research have shown that chronic heavy drinking is associated with adverse effects on the central nervous system and have revealed some of the processes that give rise to these effects. Yet it remains unclear when in the course of a person’s “drinking career” these central nervous system changes may emerge. Recent research suggests that heavy drinking may already affect brain functioning in early adolescence, even in physically healthy youths. This issue is important and interesting for at least two reasons. First, the brain continues to develop throughout adolescence and into young adulthood, and insults to the brain during this period therefore could have an impact on long-term brain function. Consistent with this assumption, animal studies have demonstrated that alcohol exposure during adolescence and young adulthood can significantly interfere with an animal’s normal brain development and function (for a review, see the accompanying article by Hiller-Sturmhöfel and Swartzwelder). Second, young adulthood is a period when most people make critical educational, occupational, and social decisions, and impaired cognitive functioning at this time could substantially affect their futures.
Questions regarding alcohol’s influence on brain development and function during adolescence (going to boot camp) are especially pertinent because heavy drinking is quite common among young people. For example, in one survey, 36 percent of 19- to 28-year-olds reported having consumed five or more drinks in a row in the preceding 2 weeks (Johnston et al. 2003). Another survey determined that 7 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds meet the diagnostic criteria for alcohol dependence (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA] 2003). Thus, a substantial number of adolescents and young adults could be at risk for alcohol-related impairment of brain development and brain function.
This is the major factor in defining alcoholism--can one predict their behavior every time they drink? Download Information Young Adult Alcoholism
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