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.