Differences in cognitive performance between male social drinkers with positive and negative family histories of alcoholism.

Abstract

Several studies have shown that alcoholics are impaired relative to controls in the areas of abstraction/problem-solving, learning/memory, and perceptual-motor skills. Other studies have proposed that the effects of alcohol lie on a continuum ranging from that seen in light social drinkers to that seen in alcoholics. Previous studies on cognitive changes in social drinkers have yielded conflicting results. There have been other studies which have shown that nonalcoholic children of alcoholics perform poorly on cognitive tests compared to children of nonalcoholic parents. The present study compared performance on a test of abstraction ability between male social drinkers with positive and negative family histories of alcoholism. The two independent variables investigated were amount of social drinking (abstainer, light/moderate, heavy) and family history of alcoholism (FH+ and FH-). The dependent variable was the mental-age score from the Shipley Institute of Living abstraction scale (SILS). Participants were 72 men college students, ages 18-22, from a midwestern and southern university. A 2 x 3 fixed effects factorial design was used to analyze the data. The results revealed that amount of social drinking and family history did not interact to affect abstraction performance. In addition, neither the main effect of social drinking or that of family history was significant. The results were contrasted with those of previous studies, with an emphasis on differences in methodology and definition of variables.