Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia report in today's Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research that children between the ages of 3 and 6 years are likely to dislike the smell of beer if their parents report drinking to escape feelings of unhappiness. The findings extend earlier knowledge that young children acquire sensory learning about alcohol and suggest that their response to alcohol may derive from emotions observed or experienced when their parents drank.
"Aversive learning appears to begin quite young, indeed," said Enoch Gordis, M.D., Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which supported the study. "While it remains to be seen whether -- and, if so, for whom -- early aversion persists or affects later behaviors, this work adds useful information to NIAAA's efforts to understand why many kids get into trouble with alcohol and others do not."
Preventing underage drinking is a focus of NIAAA research and the newly established Leadership to Keep Children Alcohol Free, a multiyear outreach initiative spearheaded by state Governors' Spouses, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and NIH's Offices of Research on Women's Health and Minority Health.
Today's report strongly ties very early learning about alcohol to the emotional context of parental drinking, according to first study author Julie A. Mennella, Ph.D. Her findings are consistent with animal model studies that found that rat pups exposed to an intoxicated mother later were averse to textures that they associated with an alcohol smell. Previous research also has shown that elementary-aged children of alcoholic parents report more negative alcohol expectancies than children of nonalcoholics, and that preschoolers whose parents drink heavily or to escape are more successful than other preschoolers at identifying alcohol by smell. Dr. Mennella and coauthor Pamela Garcia
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Contact: Ann Bradley
abradley@willco.niaaa.nih.gov
301-443-3860
NIH/National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
13-Aug-2000