Alcohol Use and Mental Health - Pilot Test of Video-assisted Drinking Topography

Alcohol use especially high-risk drinking remains a serious public health concern. Recent calls for "precision intervention" require more in-depth understanding of drinking behavioral patterns for more individualized treatment. Currently, alcohol research has relied on self-reported questionnaire or biomarkers to measure alcohol use. However, self-reports are often subjected to social desirability bias or recall errors; whereas biomarkers are prone to measurement errors, confounders for false positives, and individual variations in alcohol metabolism. There is need for an objective, reliable, and nonintrusive way to measure alcohol use with high ecological validity.

Topography can provide objective measures of consumption behavior patterns in fine grained detail. While it has been widely used in tobacco research, alcohol topography has not been well-studied. Smoking topography has been shown to provide indicative information for nicotine dependence. The investigators hypothesize that alcohol topography can also be used as an objective measure indicative of alcohol use disorder. In this project, the investigators propose to conduct a video-assisted drinking topographical study. The main objectives of this study include: (1) characterize drinking behavioral patterns by converting videotaped drinking episodes into various drinking related parameters (e.g., sipping frequency, sipping interval, sipping duration, rest duration, sipping amount, and etc.); (2) compare drinking behavioral patterns across groups defined by drinking status (social vs. heavy drinkers) and mental health status (depressed vs. non-depressed); and (3) use advanced nonlinear modeling to quantify the behavioral pattern and to derive potential indicators for alcohol use disorder.

This will be the first study to ever use videotaped topography to analyze alcohol drinking behavioral pattern using a quantum model and link it to alcohol use disorder. The study will be conducted in the simulated bar laboratory located in Yon Hall at the University of Florida (UF). Conducting alcohol topography in such a setting greatly enhances ecological validity, further increasing the capacity of this method to capture real life drinking patterns and to potentially detect alcohol use disorder.