Short communicationDoes expectancy affect alcohol absorption?
Section snippets
Participants
Twenty-five healthy beer drinkers without alcohol problems participated. Their ages ranged from 21 to 47 years, averaging 29.73 years for the 11 men and 29.43 years for the 14 women. Participants' normal alcohol intake quantity ranged from one to seven drinks per occasion and frequency from 5 to 182 occasions per year.
Procedures
Participants were asked not to use alcohol or other drugs (with the exception of caffeine and nicotine) for 12 h, fast for at least 1.5 h and abstain from caffeine for 2 h prior
Results
Correlations among participants' = weights, drinking variables, smoking quantity at the 15-min and 30-min BAC readings for both flavor conditions were not significant. There were no gender differences in the BAC estimates for any of the six measurement times (see Fig. 1).
A repeated measures (2 within-subjects factors × time) analysis of variance was used to analyze the effects of the flavor × alcohol dose manipulations. The first breath analyzer readings taken about 5 min after the participants
Discussion
There are two possible explanations why the BACs were higher in the beer condition than in the root beer condition, different congeners or differences in expectancy. There is no research with human subjects that compares the congeners (fructose in root beer and maltose in beer) used in this experiment. However, research with rats found that the fructose delayed the alcohol absorption while maltose hastened the absorption (Broitman, Gottlieb, & Vitale, 1976). Another possible explanation for our
Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by the BRIN Program of the National Center for Research Resources, NIH Grant P20 RR16471-03 to Shirley Cole-Harding. The authors wish to thank the many student research assistants, especially Charles Inman, Clare Pettis and Alana Tergeson, without whom the research could not have been done, and our colleagues, Drs. Don Burke, Deb Olson and Paul Markel for their help in reviewing the manuscript.
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