Comments | differenceblog: Alcohol and Inhibition

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Alcohol and Inhibition

Mar 08, 2007 09:52

Fillmore and Weafer (2004) found that men lost inhibitions more quickly than women under the influence of the same amount of alcohol (adjusted for weight, and matched by blood alcohol content) in a cued go/no-go task. A BBC News (2004) story about the study explains: "men's loss of inhibition was three times greater than women's with the same ( Read more... )

mark fillmore, lisa mulvihill, impulse control, cecile marczinkski, gender differences, alcohol consumption, john curtin, inhibition, sex differences, drinking, bbc, gender similarities, bradley fairchild, response inhibition, alcohol, gender similarity

Comments 6

detonate_for_me March 8 2007, 15:03:16 UTC

That's one of my all-time favorite quotes, and I do my best to follow its advice.

differenceblog March 8 2007, 15:05:36 UTC

It's a great one. I got it from the friend I call "Martini" over on my LJ.

dilletante March 8 2007, 15:49:43 UTC

what about the phrase "liquid courage" bothers you?

(it seems to me that "us[ing] alcohol to lower ... inhibitions on purpose" would be getting drunk to make it easier to do something you'd decided to do while sober, which seems like the opposite of hemingway's quote, and an idea that only bothers me in certain edge cases.)

differenceblog March 8 2007, 16:09:14 UTC

I tend to think that if you can't do it stone-cold sober, you shouldn't do it at all. It's not the phrase, but the idea, that bothers me. If you called it "with the support of my friend Jack [Daniels]", the phrase would tickle me a lot, but the concept would still bother me.

This is the opposite of the phrase "friends with benefits" which I am entirely behind in concept, but hate the words.

differenceblog March 8 2007, 16:46:50 UTC

I guess the thing I find in common between Hemingway's quote and "liquid courage" is the idea that fantasy and execution are very separate things. I have seen very few non-sexual cases of people using liquid courage, and I don't see a lot of difference between Alice using alcohol to lower Bob's inhibitions and Bob using alcohol to lower his inhibitions.

Either way, in the morning, Bob has a significantly higher chance of feeling violated than he would have sober.

dilletante March 8 2007, 19:11:25 UTC

i feel as if in general people plan around their own fluctuations of motivation all the time. it occurred to me on a long camping/hiking trip once that the advantage of hiking as a form of excercise was that if it was 12 miles to the evening's campsite then by god i was going to walk 12 miles that day, no matter how long it took or how my enthusiasm for the work flagged.

and if bob's the one deliberately plying himself with alcohol, then he may have buyer's remorse the next day (perhaps "buy" is the wrong verb here), but i'm not convinced it's appropriate to say he was "violated."

years ago i was horrified when a gymnast friend casually mentioned taking analgesics before every practice to dull the pain of all the damage she was doing to her body. (at the time i didn't realize that advil, for instance, is also an anti-inflammatory and so would actually reduce that damage.) but my worry at the time was that she might be doing an excessive amount of damage and just not realize it-- i'd have had to admit then (and have since observed ( ... )