Alcohol cues (e.g., pictures of alcoholic beverages) have been shown to produce different physiological and cognitive reactions than non-alcohol cues, which can predict future drinking. Various tasks can assess alcohol cue reactivity, but their psychometric properties are yet to be substantiated. Previous standardization procedures have explored only one dimension (e.g., valence or complexity) of the stimuli, or inadequate numbers of alcohol-related stimuli have been standardized. The purpose of this project was to systematically create an alcohol cue reactivity task for future use during neuroimaging with non-drinking youth.

Aim 1 comprehensively standardized 60 alcohol and 60 non-alcohol beverage pictures using ratings from non-alcohol drinking (N=82) young people on affective (i.e., valence and arousal) and perceptual (i.e., familiarity, complexity, brightness, and color) features. Rated stimuli were submitted to a statistical matching approach (i.e., Mahalanobi's distances and rankings) to create 26 matched pairs of alcohol and non-alcohol pictures.

Aim 2 created an event-related task with the 26 picture pairs, which were programmed into E-Prime for systematic presentation. A program was used to produce a random stimulus function to optimize condition (i.e., alcohol and non-alcohol) timing.

Aim 3 piloted the resulting task in non-drinking adolescents at risk for alcohol use disorders (AUD) based on family history of AUD (n=9) and healthy matched controls (n=11) recruited from local schools. The purpose was to investigate the equivalence of behavioral responding and reaction time to the alcohol cue task between groups, and ascertain adolescents' familiarity with the stimuli. Results from behavioral data were used to optimize the task. An alcohol cue reactivity task of 8.33 minutes in duration was developed for its use during neuroimaging with non-drinkers.

The long-term objectives of this project are to utilize this task during neuroimaging with non-drinking adolescents at-risk for AUD to investigate how reactivity to alcohol stimuli may predict alcohol use initiation and escalation. Knowledge gained from future research conducted with this cue reactivity task may help identify the role of exposure to alcohol stimuli on the development of AUD.