Handedness & drinking behaviour

This paper has been published on-line in the British Journal of Health Psychology, print version to follow.

Handedness and drinking behaviour
Kevin Denny

Objectives: A number of papers have investigated whether there is an association between handedness and alcohol consumption hypothesizing that alcoholism may be a consequence of atypical cerebral lateralization or a response to the stress involved in being a minority in a right-handed world. Research to date has mostly used small clinical samples, some without a comparison group. This paper exams this issue using a large population-based random sample.

Design: A large multi-country data set of nationally representative samples of the non-institutional population aged 50 years and older from 12 European countries was used (N=27,428). Methods Logistic regression was used to model the frequency with which individuals self-report the frequency of alcohol consumption. A series of models with differing numbers of potential confounders are estimated. The predictors of frequent and infrequent drinking are investigated separately.

Results: After controlling for a number of confounders it is shown that left-handers do drink more often. However, this is due to them being less likely to drink rarely (less than once a month) or not at all.

Conclusions: The evidence suggests that while there is an association between left-handedness and frequency of alcohol consumption there is no reason to believe that it is associated with excessive alcohol consumption or risky drinking.

Your Round, Make Mine a Low Strength!

Here is a story about how lower strength beers (3.5% alc) are being launched in Australia. I also heard about a similar launch in the UK when listening to a UK radio station last week. I think the UK product is actually going to be a 2% alcohol content beer.

It would be interesting to assess the behaviour of the people who switch over to these beers. Will they drink less alcohol, or will they drink just as much alcohol as before and develop obesity problems? Or might they start to drink more frequently given that their perceptions of a lower strength beer might be different?