The purpose of this literature review is to examine the distinction between Binge Eating Disorder (BED) and Food Addiction (FA). There is confusion and debate regarding the two: some argue they are distinct and others argue they are too similar for FA to deserve its own diagnosis. It is important to examine differences and similarities because obesity is a growing public health problem, and determining the root cause of obesity may help with efforts to reverse the problem. In addition, developing effective treatment and prevention programs will be easier once specific risk factors and characteristics of FA and BED are established. This literature review includes empirical studies and other literature reviews looking at the overlap, unique personality correlates, and general psychopathology associated with both BED and FA. A consistent finding among studies that looked at impulsivity and FA was that negative urgency and lack of perseverance accurately predicted FA, relative to BED. Other consistent correlates of FA were negative affect, emotion dysregulation, and (negative) self-esteem. Treatment options for FA currently include a combination of addiction-based treatment and psychotherapy that is commonly used for BED (i.e. CBT, DBT). Based on my research review, it seems reasonable to conclude that FA does in fact differ from BED and that efforts to identify unique treatment targets for FA are needed.

This study addresses a gap in the literature by examining interactions between parental monitoring and parental autonomy giving/personal autonomy in predicting changes in drinking behavior from high school to college. Using data from two unique studies (study 1 was 62.8% female, n = 425; study 2 was 59.9% female, n = 2245), we analyzed main effects of parental monitoring, parental autonomy-giving, and personal autonomy. We also analyzed interactions between parental monitoring and autonomy-giving, and between parental monitoring and personal autonomy. Analyses found significant main effects of parental monitoring on drinking, with high levels of parental monitoring protecting against heavy drinking. Personal autonomy was a protective factor in both high school and college, whereas parental autonomy-giving did not predict drinking behavior in either high school or during the transition to college. This calls into question the extent to which parental autonomy-giving is a primary influence on personal autonomy. Hypothesized interactions between parental monitoring and parental autonomy giving/personal autonomy were not statistically significant. In summary, parental monitoring seems to be protective in high school, and personal autonomy—but not parental autonomy-giving—is also protective. Whereas the latter finding is well established from previous studies, the protective effect of personal autonomy during the transition to college is a novel finding. This relationship suggests that efforts to identify sources of personal autonomy in early adulthood and methods for increasing autonomy may be warranted.

Adolescent and young adult alcohol use is a major public health concern given that it is the most widely used substance by teenagers. This is particularly concerning given the important biological and environmental changes that occur during this developmental period. Therefore, it is not surprising that alcohol use in adolescence is associated with a variety of negative outcomes including alcohol-related consequences, poor academic performance, aggression, and difficulty transitioning to adulthood. Because of this, it is imperative to better understand alcohol use during this time. While there are numerous measures that aim to capture adolescent alcohol use, there is not currently a measure that gathers comprehensive information on alcohol use across adolescence and into early adulthood. Therefore, we developed the Comprehensive Adolescent Drinking History Form (CADHF). The CADHF gathers detailed drinking information for each year since the onset of first regular use, including quantity and frequency of both regular use and periods of heaviest drinking. Additionally, the CADHF collects information on the participants' aggregate drinking experiences between their age of onset and age of first regular use. Using a sample of young adults who completed an alcohol challenge study, we sought to examine (1) whether route of administration of the measure impacts results, (2) which CADHF are most useful, and (3) whether the CADHF shows concurrent, convergent, and incremental validity. Results showed that, the CADHF can be administered online or over the phone and all eight indices provide valuable information depending on the research question. Additionally, strong significant correlations between the CADHF with the Timeline Follow Back (TLFB) and the Young Adult Alcohol Consequences Questionnaire (YAACQ) suggest convergent and concurrent validity. Finally, the CADHF predicted concurrent and future alcohol-related problems over and above the gold standards of alcohol consumption measures; age of onset, age of first intoxication, and the TLFB. This is the first study to retrospectively assess participant's comprehensive alcohol consumption and fills a major gap in the literature. The CADHF has the potential to inform the timing of prevention and intervention efforts and provides unique information from the current gold standards of alcohol consumption measures.

The purpose of this study was to examine executive cognitive functioning (ECF) and drinking induced disinhibition as potential mechanisms through which a family history (FH) of alcohol problems contributes to off-spring alcohol-related problems. We also examined the hypotheses that indirect effects of family history would be moderated by age of drinking onset, hypothesizing that indirect effects of family history through ECF and drinking induced disinhibition would be stronger among those with an earlier age of drinking onset. The sample included 177 college aged heavy drinking participants (66.2% men; 33.8% women; 78.8% Caucasian; 10.1 % African American; 6.9% Hispanic; 4.2% Multi-racial; 4.8% other) participating in a randomized controlled trial of naltrexone (vs. placebo) plus brief motivational counseling for drinking reduction. Measures of family history, self-control, working memory, and drinking induced disinhibition collected prior to randomization to treatment condition (intake assessment), were used to explore the hypothesized mechanisms of FH effects. Although FH was not related to either working memory or self-control, self-control predicted both drinking induced disinhibition and alcohol-related problems, with a marginal indirect effect of self-control on problems through drinking induced disinhibition. Age of drinking onset did not moderate relations between FH and measures of ECF (working memory and self-control). The findings suggest that self-control is a major factor contributing to the development of alcohol-related problems. Thus self-control may be an important target of intervention regardless of age of drinking onset or family history status.

Individuals with strong broad social motives (BSM) place high personal value on social activities and are at increased risk for heavy drinking. Those with strong BSM who also perceive that college students are heavy drinkers (high descriptive norms) might be particularly susceptible to increases in alcohol use during the transition to college, and may be likely to drink for social facilitation (social drinking motives). To test these hypotheses, we examined a mediated moderation model testing interactive effects of BSM and descriptive norms (perceptions of drinking in college) on drinking behavior, mediated by social drinking motives. Data were from 426 incoming college students and analyses were based on a subsample of 218 who reported drinking behavior at either time point. Results indicated that BSM interacted with descriptive norms to predict increases in social drinking motives from high school to college and social drinking motives in turn predicted increases in alcohol use. Probing this interaction revealed that those with high BSM and high descriptive norms experienced greater increases in social drinking motives than those with low descriptive norms. Tests of moderated indirect effects indicated that effects of BSM on drinking behavior through social drinking motives were also stronger among those with high descriptive norms. These results identify a particularly high risk group for changes in alcohol use during an important developmental period. This may have important implications for prevention and intervention methods which can attenuate college alcohol use by targeting individuals with strong BSM who perceive heavy drinking among college peers.

Recent research on alcohol use among LGB young adults indicates that sexual minority youth are at increased risk relative to their heterosexual peers. One possible contributing factor is that religiosity fails to provide the significant protection for LGB youth that it has been demonstrated to provide in general population samples. Although recent studies provide some support for this hypothesis, there is little research seeking to understand the reasons that religiosity may fail to protect against heavy drinking among LGB youth. The current study attempted to address this gap by examining relations among religiosity, age of self-identification, and alcohol use in a sample of 103 young adults self identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Using multiple regression, we found that religiosity had an indirect effect on alcohol use operating through age of identification as LGB. Higher religiosity was associated with a later age of self-identification, which in turn, predicted greater increases in alcohol use among LGB youth during the transition from high school through college. Exploratory analyses found that gender significantly moderated the influence of age of self-identification on alcohol use such that a later age of self-identification was a risk factor for increased drinking for women, but not for men. The findings have important implications for understanding complex relations between religiosity and alcohol use among LGB youth. In addition, the findings may inform the development of religious support groups for LGB youth that will allow them to experience the benefits of religious involvement that heterosexual youth experience.

Alcohol use remains a large part of collegiate life and is a major public health concern. Alcohol use generally peaks during the early twenties and declines with age. These declines, referred to as "maturing out," are presumed to be the result of the acquisition of adult roles (e.g. marriage, parenthood, employment) incompatible with alcohol use. Recent empirical evidence suggests that variables other than role transitions (e.g. personality) during emerging adulthood may also be important in understanding this process. Conceptually, changes in identity that occur during emerging adulthood may also be linked to the process of maturing out of heavy drinking, though no studies have yet addressed this possibility. Utilizing data from a large sample of graduating college students during senior year and the two following years (N = 907), the current study examined relations between aspects of emerging adult identity development (identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between, and experimentation/possibilities) and drinking outcomes (alcohol use and problems). Using multiple regression, changes in emerging adult identity development accounted for significant variability in alcohol use over and above relationship and employment status. Decreases in experimentation/possibilities significantly predicted decreases in alcohol use. Conversely, increases in feeling in-between significantly predicted decreases in alcohol use. The findings have important implications for both theories of "maturing out" and the development of prevention and early intervention efforts targeting alcohol abuse during this high-risk developmental period.

The transition from high school to college is marked by many changes, one of the most significant being the increased accessibility of alcohol, putting college students at high risk for alcohol-related consequences. It is imperative to identify factors that can protect young adults against these risks during this critical period. Although peers become increasingly influential in college, extant literature has shown that parents still have an impact on their children's behavior during this time. While parents spend less time with their children after college matriculation, they may indirectly protect against risky drinking behaviors by instilling certain values into their children before they make this transition. Using data from a large sample of students during their senior year of high school and their freshman year of college, the current study sought to examine interactive effects of parental communication and parental knowledge and caring on drinking behavior, and the extent to which internalization of personal drinking values mediate these effects. The primary study hypotheses were tested using path analysis conducted in Mplus 7.0. Full information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimation was utilized to estimate missing data and bootstrapping was used to address non-normality in the data. Results showed that, for those whose parents were high in knowledge and caring, higher levels of communication were associated with lower risk for alcohol use and problems at wave 3 through less permissive drinking values at wave 1. This finding has important implications for prevention approaches designed to reduce risk for heavy drinking and related problems during the transition to college.

Positive alcohol outcome expectancies (AOEs) are consistent longitudinal predictors of later alcohol use; however, exclusion of solitary drinking contexts in the measurement of AOEs may have resulted in an underestimation of the importance of low arousal positive (LAP) effects. The current study aimed to clarify the literature on the association between AOEs and drinking outcomes by examining the role of drinking context in AOE measurement. Further, exclusion of contextual influences has also limited understanding of the unique effects of AOEs relative to subjective responses (SR) to alcohol. The present study addressed this important question by exploring relations between AOEs and SR when drinking context was held constant across parallel measures of these constructs. Understanding which of these factors drives relations between alcohol effects and drinking behavior has important implications for intervention. After conducting confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and tests of measurement invariance for the AOE and SR measures, 4 aims collectively examined the role of context in reporting of AOEs (Aims 1 and 2), the extent to which context specific AOEs uniquely relate to drinking outcomes (Aim 3), and the importance of context effects on correspondence between AOEs and SR (Aim 4). Results of Aims 1 and 2 demonstrated that participants are imagining contexts when reporting on measures of AOEs that do not specify the context, and found significant mean differences in high and low arousal positive AOEs across contexts. Contrary to the hypotheses of Aim 3, context-specific AOEs were not significantly associated with drinking behavior. Results of Aim 4 indicated that while LAP AOEs for both unspecified and solitary contexts were associated with LAP SR in a solitary setting, unspecified context AOEs had a stronger relation than the solitary context AOEs. No significant relations between high arousal positive (HAP) AOEs and HAP SR emerged. The findings suggest that further investigation of the relation between context-specific AOEs and drinking outcomes/SR is warranted. Future studies of these hypotheses in samples with a wider range of drinking behavior, or at different stages of alcohol involvement, will elucidate whether mean level differences in context specific AOEs are important in understanding alcohol related outcomes.

The present study tested the respective mediating effects of sensation seeking and initial level of response (LR) to negative, sedative alcohol effects on the relation between the density of familial history of alcoholism and adolescent alcohol use. Additionally, the present study tested the direct effect of LR to negative, sedative alcohol effects on adolescent drinking over and above the effects of sensation seeking; and also tested the moderating effect of sensation seeking on the relation between level of response negative, sedative alcohol effects and adolescent drinking. Specifically, OLS regression models first estimated the effects of sensation seeking, LR to negative, sedative alcohol effects, and their interaction on alcohol outcomes, over and above the influence of covariates. Indirect effects were then tested using the PRODCLIN method through RMediation. Analyses failed to support sensation seeking as a mediator in the relation between familial history of alcoholism and adolescent drinking, and as a moderator of the relation between LR and adolescent drinking. However, analyses did support a robust direct effect of LR to negative, sedative alcohol effects on adolescent alcohol involvement. A significant mediating effect of initial LR to negative, sedative alcohol effects on the relation between familial alcoholism and adolescent drinking was found, however failed to maintain significance in post-hoc analyses attenuating the downward bias of the measure of initial LR. Initial LR to negative, sedative alcohol effects continued to predict adolescent drinking after attenuating measure bias. These findings strengthen research on initial LR to negative, sedative alcohol effects as a risk for greater alcohol involvement in adolescence, and underscore the complexity of studying the familial transmission of alcoholism in adolescent populations