Gustafson, Roland. "Lack of Correspondence Between Alcohol
Related Aggressive Expectancies for Self and Others,"
Psychological Reports, 60 (1987): 707 10.
The article by Roland Gustafson was identified using both the on line and printed versions of Psychological Abstracts. It was listed under the key work "alcohol" and further defined using the terms adolescence, college students, and aggression. As well, the article was cross referenced using the on line version of Sociological Abstracts using the same terms as before.
The research itself deals with the way that college students respond to a moderate dose of alcohol. Expected behaviors using the moderate dosage included varying degrees of anger or aggressiveness, to more dichotomous behaviors that made the subject feel more calm or kind. Interestingly enough, when the subjects themselves were asked about their expected behaviors, the majority believed that others would become more aggressive while they themselves would become calmer (p. 707).
Past research into the subject showed that there were a myriad of cultural expectations about the moderate usage of alcohol. Previous research found that it was quite common for people to expect others to be far more affected by the ingestion of a substance than they would be, but "the discrepant empirical results . . . may possibly be attributed to the fact that subjects have general expectancies connecting aggression with alcohol but do not have the corresponding personal expectations for themselves" (pp. 707 8).
Gustafson used eighty male college students that had a mean age of just over twenty five. They were asked to fill out a questionnaire broken into two parts. They were initially asked to describe the effects that moderate alcohol intoxication had on other people. Gustafson asked the subjects to mark certain adjectives out of a total of ten descriptive words or phrases. The subjects were then asked to describ...