Improving our understanding of the etiology of problematic alcohol use via alcohol’s reinforcement value in longitudinal and experimental data

As alcohol use researchers, we have the goal to understand who is likely to develop a habit of problematic alcohol use, when people are more likely to engage in problematic alcohol use, and how we can help people recover from alcohol use disorder. One promising avenue of research towards these aims is to study how people value alcohol relative to alternative substance-free reinforcers. This perspective posits that problematic alcohol use can be explained, predicted, and perhaps even recovered from (Field et al., 2020) by studying and manipulating the utility (costs relative to benefits) of alcohol and available alternatives. Initial research on the trait-level indicates that people with substance use disorders not only assign higher value to substances (Hogarth & Hardy, 2018) but also lower value to substance-free rewards (e.g., appetizing food; Lubman et al., 2009). People who assign higher value to alcohol consume more alcohol and respond worse to behavioral interventions (Murphy et al., 2015). At the same time, the value people assign to alcohol fluctuates as a function of external and internal states (Acuff et al., 2019), highlighting the need to study the reinforcement value of alcohol both between- and within-person. Over the past decade, the idea to study the reinforcement value of alcohol has resulted in the development and application of several interesting measures and paradigms, such as the Alcohol Purchase Task (Murphy & Mackillop, 2006), reinforcement surveys (Hallgren et al., 2016), and two-alternative forced-choice tasks (Hardy & Hogarth, 2017). In this symposium, we will present a mix of between- and within-person research attempting to understand the who, when, and how of problematic alcohol use via alcohol’s reinforcement value. Our research makes use of two strong designs (longitudinal and experimental). We operationalize alcohol valuation in several ways, focusing on behavioral economic demand, relative reinforcement ratio, and parameters from a computational model that reflect the value-based decision to consume alcohol. We sampled a mix of medium- and heavy-drinking college students, young adults, and older adults. Together, our research combines various research designs and methods to improve our understanding of the motivational underpinnings of problematic alcohol use.

Jun 24, 2023