Alcohol and anxiety: Ethopharmacological approaches

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Abstract

Blanchard, Robert J., Magee, Linda, Veniegas, Rosemary and D. Caroline Blanchard. Alcohol and Anxiety: Ethopharmacological Approaches. Prog. NeuroPsychopharmacol. & Biol. Psychiat. 1993, 17: (2) 171–182.

  • 1.

    1. Anxiety reduction may be a mechanism in many of the behavioral problems associated with alcohol intake, including abuse, addiction, aggression, and impulsivity.

  • 2.

    2. New “ethoexperimental” models of anxiety measure natural antipredator defensive behaviors. These include flight, freezing, and defensive threat and attack to discrete, present, threat stimuli; a pattern of risk assessment behaviors to potential threat; proximic avoidance and inhibition of nondefensive behaviors to both present and potential threat; and antipredator alarm vocalizations in a social situation when concealment is possible.

  • 3.

    3. Alcohol reduces freezing, behavioral inhibition, and proximic avoidance. It increases risk assessment from a freezing baseline and decreases it from a movement (risk assessment) baseline. It has a biphasic effect on defensive attack, increasing it at low doses, but decreasing it at high doses. Alcohol has little or no effect on flight, defensive threat, and antipredator ultrasound.

  • 4.

    4. The effects of alcohol on behavioral inhibition, proximic avoidance, and risk assessment from either a freezing or a movement baseline are identical to those of the classic anxiolytic, diazepam. However, alcohol appears to impact several defensive behaviors not influenced by diazepam.

  • 5.

    5. These results provide considerable support for an anxiolytic interpretation of alcohol effects, but suggest that alcohol may have additional effects than those on anxiety mechanisms.

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