Research & Resources

This study tested the effect of college students’ attitudes toward heavy drinking and their past-year experience of having had a blackout in predicting their motivation and success around reducing their drinking over time. Drinkers with a negative attitude toward heavy drinking who had experienced a past-year blackout had the strongest motivation to reduce drinking and yielded the greatest reductions in peak drinking behavior over time. The researchers proposed that for young adults who do not positively endorse heavy drinking, blackouts may present a “moment of opportunity” for intervention. 

This paper, “Opportunities for reducing college drinking: The roles of drinking attitudes and blackout experience,” was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and published in the journal Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research.