Many college students engage in binge drinking especially during their winter and spring breaks. Compared with moderate drinkers, they are more likely to have injuries, unplanned and unprotected sexual intercourse, and trouble with campus police and to cause property damage, according to a recent national survey of college students.

John Baer, Ph.D., and his colleagues in the department of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle have designed a brief intervention to reduce these harmful consequences and the students’ overall alcohol consumption.

A recent study of the intervention in freshmen college students at risk for alcohol dependence and related problems shows promising results, according to the August 1998 Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

The high-risk sample consisted of 348 male and female university freshmen who reported drinking alcohol about twice a week and consuming almost 11 alcoholic drinks a week at the beginning of the four-year study. They were assigned to the brief intervention group or the control group, which received only assessments.

In contrast, the 115 students assigned to the normative comparison group representing all risk levels reported consuming alcohol about once a week with fewer than six drinks per week.

All participants were asked to record their drinking rates daily and monthly and complete assessments of family alcohol problems, personal drinking, and conduct disorder. In addition, participants filled out a questionnaire measuring drinking and drug use, problems associated with alcohol abuse and dependence, and psychosocial items including perceived drinking norms and sexual behavior at baseline, six months, one year, and two years, according to the authors.

Trained counselors met once with each student assigned to the brief intervention to review his or her drinking patterns and risks for alcohol dependence. " The counselors also compared each student’s drinking rates with college averages and identified their current and future risk for problems such as poor grades, blackouts, and accidents," said Baer.

The counselors discussed the placebo and nonspecific effects of alcohol on social behavior. " College students tend to view alcohol as a magic elixir that makes shy individuals sociable and outgoing. They also assume that more alcohol is better," said Baer.

The counselors were instructed to use the test results to facilitate conversations during the brief intervention and not to offer students direct advice. " Motivational techniques assume that college-student drinkers are ambivalent and should draw their own conclusions about changing their behavior," said Baer.

A year after the motivational interviews, research team members mailed study participants bar graphs depicting their rates of alcohol consumption and related problems at baseline, six months, and one year and a summary of their risk category (low, medium, high, or extreme). Thirty-four motivational interviews were conducted with students in the high-risk and extreme-risk categories, the authors pointed out.

The results of the two-year assessment show that high-risk students in the brief intervention group cut their drinking frequency and quantity by nearly half compared with a slight decrease in rates for the high-risk control group, said Baer.

Moreover, the intervention participants reported at the two-year follow-up significantly fewer alcohol-related problems, such as not being able to study for a test or do homework, than did the control participants, Baer noted.

A brief intervention developed by a psychologist at the University of South Florida (USF) shows promising short-term results with male college drinkers.

Mark Goldman, Ph.D., distinguished research professor of psychology at USF, found that rates of alcohol consumption dropped immediately after the intervention and remained low seven weeks later at the final assessment.

" Most students expect to experience positive effects from drinking alcohol. Our laboratory experiment challenges their expectations by showing them there is a placebo effect," said Goldman in an interview.

He and his colleagues at USF have set up a bar in their laboratory to use for " expectancy challenge" experiments with college students. Half the students (age 18 or older) receive two or three alcoholic drinks and the other half receive nonalcoholic beverages. The participants are told to interact with each other for about 45 minutes and then identify which individuals received alcohol based on their behavior.

" Even with a 50/50 chance, everyone makes mistakes in identifying who received alcohol. We use these and other study results to teach students how expectations influence alcohol consumption," he said.

He referred to his expectancy-challenge study published in the January 1998 Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology with 54 male college students who were moderate to heavy drinkers.

Thirty-six students received the expectancy-challenge treatment during two weekly sessions of at least 60 minutes each. This was followed by a didactic session, and two weeks later participants returned with their drinking charts and were assessed on several measures.

The final measures were completed at about nine weeks, which was two weeks after a brief " booster session" asking participants to consider the impact of the program on their daily lives, noted the authors.

The results showed significantly lower drinking levels among the 36 treatment participants compared with the 18 control group participants, said Goldman. He is currently conducting a large two-year study with male and female college students to attempt to replicate the short-term findings.