Co-occurring Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Alcohol Use Disorders in Veteran Populations.

Co-occurring posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and alcohol use disorders have become increasingly prevalent in military populations. Over the past decade, PTSD has emerged as one of the most common forms of psychopathology among the 1.7 million American military personnel deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), and Operation New Dawn (OND).

The college and noncollege experience: a review of the factors that influence drinking behavior in young adulthood.

Objective: To place college drinking within its larger developmental context, we reviewed studies that compare drinking behavior among college students with that of their age-matched non-student peers. Among the recurrent themes identified across these studies, we particularly noted discrepancies in the conceptualization and operationalization of both college status and noncollege status. These discrepancies, and other methodological variations, were then examined because they influence conclusions about drinking outcomes.

Alcohol expectancies and reactivity to alcohol-related and affective cues.

Recent conceptualizations of alcohol expectancies relate cognitive schemas to their neurobiological underpinnings; cue reactivity paradigms lend themselves well to testing this broadened conceptual framework. In the present study, we examined the relationship between self-reported alcohol expectancies and responses to alcohol-related and affective picture cues among fifty-five young adults. In addition to traditional subjective and psychophysiological indices of cue reactivity, the startle eyeblink reflex was obtained during picture cue presentations to address both attention-arousal (early probes) and affective-motivational (late probes) aspects of cue processing.