The Handbook of Alcohol Use

The Handbook of Alcohol Use and Abuse: Understandings from Synapse to Society explores an eclectic set of methodological and conceptual tools to create a more diverse understanding of alcohol use, misuse and treatment. Moving past the understanding of alcohol usage through the lens of a disease-based model, this book approaches the topic from individual cognition, small group/system social interactions, and population studies. Each approach examines the phenomena of alcohol use and misuse differently, with each offering its own tactics to combat behavior. While these viewpoints are often construed as antagonistic to the disease based model, the book explores how they can be complementary.

The handbook brings together an international group of experts in the field to explore how alcohol use and misuse can be understood at varying levels and how these varying conceptualizations can both contrast and combine to form a new picture.

• Synthesizes varied levels of analysis on alcohol usage
• Explores alcohol use from both individual and societal levels
• Examines disease-based and psychosocial approaches
• Considers social identify and alcohol use
• Details how Big Data is used in alcohol research

Researchers, professors, and students in the field of psychology and addiction, health psychology, and the biology of addiction. Secondary markets include those in public health and policy change

1. The alcohol landscape and methodologies: a multilevel understanding
2. How alcohol works: pharmacological effects of alcohol and synthetic alternatives
3. Biological approaches to use and misuse: The disease-based model of alcohol misuse
4. Learning from the deceased: forensic psychopathology and insights into alcohol misuse
5. Leaving a legacy: neurological change in alcohol use and misuse
6. Genes and alcohol use
7. Learning in alcohol use and misuse: reinforcement and reward
8. Alcohol and cognitive performance
9. Alcohol and attentional processes
10. Running low on will-power: self-regulation and alcohol use
11. Thinking about my thoughts about alcohol: metacognitive understandings
12. Levels of cognitive understanding: reflective and impulsive cognition in alcohol use and misuse
13. Psychosocial approaches to alcohol: The need for change?
14. Social cognition in alcohol use and misuse
15. Motivational models of alcohol use
16. Alcohol (mis)use and emotion
17. Intervening via social cognitive accounts of alcohol use and misuse processes in intervention practices
18. Social cognitive models of alcohol use and misuse: what is their predictive validity?
19. ‘I can keep up with the best of them’: The role of norms on drinking behaviour
20. Alcohol and individual / group performance
21. Identity and alcohol use and misuse
22. Taking social identity into practice
23. Sociological constructions of alcohol and alcoholism. Current and historical perspectives
24. Bringing it together- implications of social connections for practice and intervention
25. Understanding alcohol use and misuse via Big Data
26. Public health challenges: how alcohol affects society (taxation, healthcare, welfare, legal etc, current and future)
27. Public Health messaging around alcohol: lessons learned
28. Providing public healthcare for alcohol misuse: historical contexts, present provision and future prospects
29. Disease based vs psychosocial approaches: contrasts and synthesis
30. Working together: barriers and opportunities for evidence-based practice
31. Alcohol: understandings from synapse to society