Neural Mechanisms of Risk Taking and Relationships with Hazardous Drinking

摘要

OVER THE PAST decade, impulsivity has been shown to be a risk-conferring trait for alcohol use disorders (AUDs; Poulos et al., 1995) and a consequence of ethanol-induced neurotoxicity in frontal cortex associated with years of chronic alcohol use (Jentsch and Taylor, 1999). Previous studies have provided a wealth of evidence for increased impulsivity in alcohol and other substance use disorders using questionnaire-based methods (e.g., MacKillop et al., 2007) and laboratory task-based methods including delay discounting (Claus et al., 2011a; Petry, 2001), and response inhibition (Finn et al., 2002). While previous studies have investigated impulsivity in AUDs, few studies have focused on risk taking, an important component of impulsivity. One task-based measure of risk taking that has increasingly appeared in the literature on risk taking and impulsivity is the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART; Lejuez et al., 2002).