Research has shown that drinking motives (or reasons for consuming alcohol) are strong predictors of alcohol use; moreover, enhancement and social motives are among the strongest predictors of alcohol use. Given limited research to date, the purpose of the current study is to examine how drinking motives relate to drinking alone and also to drinking with friends. College student drinkers ages 18-24 were recruited for an ongoing study. To be eligible, participants had to report alcohol use two or more days a week and one or more occasions of heavy episodic drinking in the last two weeks. Baseline data on alcohol use, drinking motives, and drinking context were used for the current analyses (N = 292 to date; 52% female, 71% Caucasian, mean age = 20.17 years). Participants were asked to report how often they drank alone and with friends on a scale from “never” to “daily or almost daily.” In addition, they were asked to report motives for drinking on each of five subscales using response options from “almost never/never” to “almost always/always." The current study will use regression analyses to test associations with four of the subscales: coping-anxiety, coping-depression, enhancement, and social motives. We hypothesize that higher coping motives will be associated with being more likely to report drinking alone and with friends. Additionally, we hypothesize that higher social and enhancement motives will be associated with being less likely to report drinking alone and more likely to report drinking with friends. Results from this study will provide a better understanding of why people decide to drink and in which different social contexts, thus providing valuable information to guide interventions on how to better incorporate drinking motives and social context.

The Standard Model of elementary particle physics (SM) describes a connection between electromagnetic and radioactive decays known as the Conservation of Vector Current. One area of new physics research is in the formation of additional currents that are not in the SM called “Second Class Currents” (SCC). It is thought that these could possibly produce a breaking of the Conservation of Vector Current. An experiment performed previously at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) showed evidence for a large breaking of the expected connection between the beta and electromagnetic decay of 22Na. Although one possibility for explaining the discrepancy is to attribute it to the SCC’s mentioned above it is also possible to explain it without introducing new physics. The electromagnetic transition in 22Na, which has so far been assumed to be purely of magnetic character (M1), could actually have a (so-far unexpected) contribution of electric character (E2). We ran an experiment to determine the E2/M1 ratio, by measuring the angular distribution of gamma rays from oriented 22Na. The orientation is naturally obtained when producing the excited 22Na state via a 21Ne(p, γ) resonance at ~7.8 MeV, which is known to predominantly feed the analog 2+ state in 22Na. The decay goes from 21Ne with a certain momentum, p, to 22Na via emission of electromagnetic radiation (γ: gamma ray emission). The data will be collected with five Germanium detectors at different angles simultaneously.

Fear generalization is the process by which conditioned fear spreads to new, objectively non-threatening stimuli, which, when inappropriately avoided, can lead to psychopathology after trauma. Although fear overgeneralization and maladaptive avoidance are implicated in the development of anxiety and stressor-related disorders, there is little evidence that fear overgeneralization and avoidance are associated with each other. Individuals with “high stress load,” characterized by high neuroticism and prior trauma exposure, may be at higher risk for both fear overgeneralization and experiential and behavioral avoidance. Eighty women, 41 with high stress load and 30 with low stress load, completed questionnaires measuring experiential and behavioral avoidance in their lives and completed a novel, ecologically-valid fear generalization paradigm. In this paradigm, two neutral female faces served as conditioned danger and safety cues, and ambiguous faces, morphed on a continuum between the danger and safety cues, served as generalization stimuli. We predict that participants with high stress load will report higher levels of both experiential and behavioral avoidance. We also predict that high self-reported avoidance will be strongly associated with higher fear overgeneralization in the task. This study will examine the extent to which self-reported avoidance maps onto active avoidance, assessing whether experiential and behavioral avoidance are related to avoidance of non-threatening generalization stimuli. Given that gold standard interventions for anxiety and stressor-related disorders target threat cues, this research highlights the potential importance of helping patients learn how to resist avoiding ambiguous and non-threatening cues.