ALCOHOL AS AN UNCONDITIONED STIMULUS IN HUMAN CLASSICAL-CONDITIONING

Recent experiments with human subjects have shown that drug cues (e.g. sight of beer or needle and syringe) elicit different responses than do neutral stimuli. However, because conditioning has not been carried out in the majority of cases, it is not clear why drug cues have diff erent response eliciting capacities; associative and nonassociative me chanisms may both play a part. In this experiment a counterbalanced di fferential conditioning procedure was used to isolate the role of asso ciative processes in the development of physiological, behavioural, an d subjective conditioned responses to cues for alcohol over the course of repeated conditioning sessions. Twelve healthy volunteers took par t in the experiment which involved each subject attending for ten sess ions. On physiological measures evidence was found for conditioning of skin conductance and cardiac inter-beat interval responses to cues fo r alcohol delivery. Over the course of conditioning on behavioural mea sures of drink consumption there were changes in the rate of consumpti on and number of sips taken as a function of whether or not the drinks contained alcohol. Finally, on subjective measures, there was a diffe rential change in subjective state in response to alcohol and soft dri nk expectancy as conditioning progressed.