Effect of Television Programming and Advertising on Alcohol Consumption in Normal Drinkers

The drinking behavior of 96 male normal drinking college students was assessed after they viewed a videotape of a popular prime-time television program complete with advertisements. Different versions of the videotape were used to evaluate the effects of a television program with and without alcohol scenes as crossed with the effects of three different types of advertisements (i.e., beer, nonalcoholic beverages and food). After viewing the videotape, the subjects, who were led to believe that they were participating in two separate and unrelated sets of experimental procedures, were asked to perform a taste rating of light beers, which actually provided an unobtrusive measure of their alcohol consumption. The results provided no support for the widely held assumption that drinking scenes in television programs or televised advertisements for alcoholic beverages precipitate increased drinking by viewers. This finding, however, must be considered in the context of the laboratory setting of the study, and thus may not generalize to real-life television viewing. Further research in this area is clearly needed, including an evaluation of the effects of television program content and advertisements on other populations (e.g., alcohol abusers)

The Reliability of Alcohol Abusers’ Self-Reports Of Drinking and Life Events That Occurred In the Distant Past

This study investigated the test-retest reliability of 69 alcohol abusers\u27 current reports about their past (approximately 8 years prior to interview) drinking behavior and life events. Drinking behavior was assessed by the Lifetime Drinking History (LDH) questionnaire and life events were assessed using the Recent Life Changes Questionnaire (RLCQ). Reliability coefficients for LDH variables were generally moderate to high (r = .52 to .81). Using empirical criteria, the diagnostic power of the two LDH interviews to classify correctly subjects as either having had or not having had a drinking problem was quite high. The reliability coefficient for the RLCQ was r = .85 and 91.7% of the identified events were reported in both interviews. Similarly high test-retest reliabilities and individual event agreement rates were obtained for the six homogeneous subscales of the RLCQ. Subjects were also asked why they had given inconsistent answers to life events questions in the two interviews. Inconsistencies often resulted from errors in the temporal placement of events or from misunderstanding items, rather than from failure to recall an event; this suggests that some sources of error in recalling life events can be reduced. It is concluded that alcohol abusers\u27 reports of drinking and life events occurring many years prior to the date of interview are generally reliable. This finding is consistent with previous studies showing high test-retest reliabilities for reports of recent drinking and related events

Reliability of a Timeline Method: Assessing Normal Drinkers’ Reports of Recent Drinking and a Comparative Evaluation across Several Populations.

Since alcohol research involves both clinical and non-clinical populations, it is important to evaluate drinking assessment methods across different subject populations. Over the past several years, the reliability of the timeline (TL) method of gathering retrospective reports of recent drinking has been evaluated in several studies, and this method has been shown to have generally high reliability with outpatient alcohol abusers, in-patient chronic alcoholics, and normal drinker college students. The present study examined the reliability of the TL method with normal drinkers in the general population. Similar to other populations, the test-retest reliability of male (n = 31) and female (n = 31) normal drinkers\u27 reports of recent drinking behaviour was found to be generally high. Data gathered by the TL method were also compared to data gathered from the same subjects using a common quantity-frequency (QF) method. Consistent with earlier reports, QF categorization provided a relatively insensitive measure of individual differences in drinking behaviour as compared to TL-derived data. Since the TL method has now been shown to have fairly good reliability for assessing recent drinking across a broad range of drinkers, it can be used for comparative evaluations of drinking behaviour across studies with different subject populations

Cruciform porphyrin pentamers

Cruciform porphyrin pentamers 15 and 16 are obtained in good yield by acid-catalyzed tetramerization of ZnII-pyrroloporphyrin 14, followed by oxidation with DDQ; pyrroloporphyrins are in turn obtained from the corresponding pyrrolochlorins by Diels-Alder type reactions of porphyrins involving thermal extrusion of sulfur dioxide from a pyrrole-fused 3-sulfolene