To Cause Harm and to be Harmed by Others: New Perspectives on Alcohol's Harms to Others.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Seid AK
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4603526 | biostudies-literature | 2015
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
To Cause Harm and to be Harmed by Others: New Perspectives on Alcohol's Harms to Others.
Seid Abdu K AK Grittner Ulrike U Greenfield Thomas K TK Bloomfield Kim K
Substance abuse : research and treatment 20151012 Suppl 2
<h4>Objective</h4>To examine how sociodemographic factors and alcohol consumption are related to a four-way typology of causing harm to others and/or being harmed by others' and one's own drinking.<h4>Data and methods</h4>Data from the 2011 Danish national survey (n = 2,569) were analyzed with multi nomial logistic regression.<h4>Results</h4>Younger age and heavy drinking were significant correlates of both causing harm and being harmed. Women and better educated respondents were more likely to ...[more]
Similar Datasets
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Project description:AimsAlcohol policy effects on alcohol's harms due to others' drinking (AHTO) and contextual factors that may mediate such policy effects have been understudied. This study examines state binge drinking prevalence as a mediator of the relationship between state alcohol policy and socioeconomic environments and individual-level AHTO.MethodsA nationally representative sample of US adults (N = 32,401; 13,873 males, 18,528 females) from the 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015 National Alcohol Surveys and the 2015 National Alcohol's Harm to Others Survey, administered in telephone interviews and based on random digit dialed sampling, were linked with state-level Alcohol Policy Scale (APS) scores, binge drinking prevalence and socioeconomic status (SES) data. Three 12-month AHTO measures were family/marriage difficulties, assault or vandalism and riding with drunk driver or having traffic accident. Three-level mediation analyses were conducted, controlling for gender, race, education, marital status, family problem-drinking history and state policing rate.ResultsThe effects of the APS on reduced risks for assault/vandalism and drinking-driving harms were significantly mediated by reduced state binge drinking prevalence. The APS had no direct or indirect effect on family/marital trouble. State SES had significant indirect effects on increased risks for assault/vandalism and driving-related harm through increased state binge drinking prevalence and a direct effect on reduced family/marital problems.ConclusionsA more stringent alcohol policy environment could reduce assault/vandalism and driving-related harm due to another drinker by lowering state binge drinking rates. Alcohol policies may not be effective in reducing family problems caused by another drinker more prevalent in low-SES states.
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| S-EPMC6542752 | biostudies-literature
Project description:OBJECTIVE:This study examined a range of indicators of alcohol's harm to others (AHTO) among U.S. adults and assessed sociodemographic and alcohol-related risk factors for AHTO. METHOD:The data came from 8,750 adult men and women in two parallel 2015 U.S. national surveys conducted in English and Spanish. Both surveys used computer-assisted telephone interviews and two-stage, stratified, list-assisted, random samples of adults ages 18 and older. RESULTS:One in five adults experienced at least one of ten 12-month harms because of someone else's drinking. The prevalence of specific harm types and characteristics differed by gender. Women were more likely to report harm due to drinking by a spouse/partner or family member, whereas men were more likely to report harm due to a stranger's drinking. Being female also predicted family/financial harms. Younger age increased risk for all AHTO types, except physical aggression. Being of Black/other ethnicity, being separated/widowed/divorced, and having a college education without a degree each predicted physical aggression harm. The harmed individual's own heavy drinking and having a heavy drinker in the household increased risk for all AHTO types. The risk for physical aggression due to someone else's drinking was particularly elevated for heavy drinking women. CONCLUSIONS:Secondhand effects of alcohol in the United States are substantial and affected by sociodemographics, the harmed individual's own drinking, and the presence of a heavy drinker in the household. Broad-based and targeted public health measures that consider AHTO risk factors are needed to reduce alcohol's secondhand harms.
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Project description:Various harms from others' drinking have been studied individually and at single points in time. We conducted a US population 15-year trend analysis and extend prior research by studying associations of depression with combinations of four harms - family/marriage difficulties, financial troubles, assault, and vandalism - attributed to partners or family members. Data come from four National Alcohol Surveys conducted by telephone in 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015 (analytic sample = 21,184). Weighted logistic regression models estimated time trends adjusting for victim characteristics (gender, age, race/ethnicity, marital status, poverty, employment, family history of alcohol problems, and drinking maximum). The 2015 survey asked the source of the harm; we used similar models to examine characteristics, including anxiety and depression, associated with various combinations of family/marriage, financial, and assault harms due to partner's/spouse's/family members' drinking. A significant upward trend (P <0.001) from 2000 to 2015 was seen for financial troubles but not for other harms due to someone else's drinking. In 2015, depression and/or anxiety were strongly associated with exposures to harms and combinations of harms identified as stemming from drinking spouse/partner and/or family members. The results shed new light on 15-year trends and associations of harms with personal characteristics. A replicated finding is how the victim's own heavy drinking pattern is implicated in risks for exposures to harms from someone else's drinking. Documenting risk factors for and mental health impacts is important for interventions to reduce alcohol's harm to others.
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Project description:Aims:Some types of harms experienced because of others' drinking (AHTO) may produce greater negative effects than other harms. However, AHTO survey items were developed to measure type, not severity, of harm. We aimed to compare the perceived severity of a comprehensive list of AHTO items to assess consistency in subjective ratings of severity, facilitate a more nuanced analysis and identify strategies to improve measurement of AHTO in epidemiological surveys. Methods:Thirty-six leaders of national alcohol surveys (conducted between 1997 and 2016) from 23 countries rated the typical severity of negative effects on the victim of each of 48 types of AHTO using a scale from zero (no negative effect) to 10 (very severe negative effect). The survey leaders were also asked to provide open-ended feedback about each harm and the severity-rating task generally. Results:Of 48 harm items, five were classified as extreme severity (mean rating ?8), 17 as high (?6 <8), 25 as moderate (?4 <6), and one as low (?4). We used two-way random effects models to estimate absolute agreement intraclass correlation coefficients (AA-ICC) and consistency of agreement intraclass correlation coefficients (CA-ICC). Results showed that there was fair to excellent absolute agreement and consistency of agreement among "experts'' ratings of the severity of harms from others' drinking (single measures CA-ICC = 0.414, single measures AA-ICC = 0.325; average CA-ICC = 0.940, average AA-ICC = 0.914). Harms to children, and harms causing physical, financial, practical, or severe emotional impacts were rated most severe. Conclusions:When designing new AHTO surveys and conducting analyses of existing data, researchers should pay close attention to harms with high perceived severity to identify effective ways to prevent severe AHTO and reduce the negative health and social impacts of AHTO. In-depth analyses of specific sub-sets of harms and qualitative interviews with victims of severe AHTO may prove useful.
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Project description:Concern for the suffering of others is central to moral decision making. How humans evaluate others' suffering, relative to their own suffering, is unknown. We investigated this question by inviting subjects to trade off profits for themselves against pain experienced either by themselves or an anonymous other person. Subjects made choices between different amounts of money and different numbers of painful electric shocks. We independently varied the recipient of the shocks (self vs. other) and whether the choice involved paying to decrease pain or profiting by increasing pain. We built computational models to quantify the relative values subjects ascribed to pain for themselves and others in this setting. In two studies we show that most people valued others' pain more than their own pain. This was evident in a willingness to pay more to reduce others' pain than their own and a requirement for more compensation to increase others' pain relative to their own. This "hyperaltruistic" valuation of others' pain was linked to slower responding when making decisions that affected others, consistent with an engagement of deliberative processes in moral decision making. Subclinical psychopathic traits correlated negatively with aversion to pain for both self and others, in line with reports of aversive processing deficits in psychopathy. Our results provide evidence for a circumstance in which people care more for others than themselves. Determining the precise boundaries of this surprisingly prosocial disposition has implications for understanding human moral decision making and its disturbance in antisocial behavior.
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Project description:Why should organisms incur a cost in order to inflict a (usually greater) cost on others? Such costly harming behavior may be favored when competition for resources occurs locally, because it increases individuals' fitness relative to close competitors. However, there is no explicit experimental evidence supporting the prediction that people are more willing to harm others under local versus global competition. We illustrate this prediction with a game theoretic model, and then test it in a series of economic games. In these experiments, players could spend money to make others lose more. We manipulated the scale of competition by awarding cash prizes to the players with the highest payoffs per set of social partners (local competition) or in all the participants in a session (global competition). We found that, as predicted, people were more harmful to others when competition was local (Study 1). This result still held when people "earned" (rather than were simply given) their money (Study 2). In addition, when competition was local, people were more willing to harm ingroup members than outgroup members (Study 3), because ingroup members were the relevant competitive targets. Together, our results suggest that local competition in human groups not only promotes willingness to harm others in general, but also causes ingroup hostility.
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