Emmanuel Kuntsche

La Trobe University · Centre for Alcohol Policy Research (CAPR), School of Psychology and Public Health

Introduction Alcohol exposure is common in popular films, and research has demonstrated a link between alcohol exposure and use. The likelihood of implementing specific policies to reduce the amount of film exposure is dependent on the level of public support; however, evidence is currently lacking. This study investigated how supportive people are...

Exposure to alcohol content in media increases alcohol consumption and related harm. With exponential growth of media content, it is important to use algorithms to automatically detect and quantify alcohol exposure. Foundation models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) can detect alcohol exposure through Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) w...

Introduction: The aim of this study was to: (i) determine the feasibility of using ecological momentary assessment to collect data from Australian Football League (AFL) fans; (ii) explore pre-game, during-game and post-game consumption patterns of AFL fans; and (iii) explore the social and setting-related factors associated with risky single occas...

This study investigates the individual and event-level correlates of drinking prior to attending Australian Football League (AFL) games among a sample of Australian spectators. A total of 30 adults (20% female, mean age = 32) completed a series of questionnaires (n = 417) before, during, and after an AFL match on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Clus...

Background This feasibility and validity study aimed to evaluate and compare ecological momentary assessment (EMA) surveys and transdermal SCRAM-CAM monitors to measure drinking while watching Australian Rules Football (AFL). Methods During 29 events, 13 participants wore a SCRAM-CAM monitor while completing EMA surveys. Correspondence in the alco...

Exposure to alcohol content in media increases alcohol consumption and related harm. With exponential growth of media content, it is important to use algorithms to automatically detect and quantify alcohol exposure. Foundational models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) can detect alcohol exposure through Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL)...

Background: New-generation transdermal monitors such as the ION Research Alpha Prototypes (ION RAP) hold promise for real-time alcohol measurement, with improvements in design features such as sampling frequency, size and comfort. This paper aims to provide the first comparisons of the wrist worn enzyme-based ION RAP and the fuel-cell based SCRAM-...

Background: In the last decade, alcohol consumption among middle-aged women (40-65 years old) in Australia increased, despite declines in overall population consumption. Web-based, brief interventions are promising for reducing alcohol consumption, with efficacy shown in a wide range of populations. However, no published interventions have been de...

Reducing alcohol use is challenging due to the volume of alcohol shown in media and the relationship between exposure and use. It is unclear to what degree people are aware of and able to estimate alcohol exposure in the media, such as in movies. In this study, 609 Australian adults estimated the amount of alcohol exposure in up to 10 of 102 popula...

This paper aims to provide an overview of the contemporary quantitative methods to assess alcohol consumption. We identified and rated six data collection methods according to four typical aims (i.e. to assess: per capita consumption, drinking patterns, event-specific consumption, and consumption over time) and five desirable features (low cognitiv...

Introduction Pre-drinking motives (PDM) are linked with different characteristics of pre-drinking occasions (e.g., fast-paced drinking, socializing, moving across locations) that are potentially related to adverse night-level consequences. This study examines the direct associations of three PDM dimensions (fun/intoxication, facilitation, and convi...

Background: Seeing alcohol in media has been demonstrated to increase alcohol craving, impulsive decision-making, and hazardous drinking. Due to the exponential growth of (social) media use it is important to develop algorithms to quantify alcohol exposure efficiently in electronic images. In this article, we describe the development of an improved...

Background and aims: Role models around the adolescent, including parents, peers, best friends, and older siblings all act in ways to socialize the adolescent into alcohol use. This study aims to examine the effect of exposure to sibling's drinking alongside the more traditionally examined role models on alcohol use among adolescents. Design and...

Introduction: Evidence suggests an association between perceived alcohol-related norms and personal consumption. These perceptions develop over years of observation and exposure to alcohol, likely beginning in early childhood, and likely differing by sex. Understanding the early development of perceptions of drinking may provide insight into the d...

Background: While consumption of alcohol does not often begin until early adolescence, young children are highly capable of internalizing normative information through observational learning. We used a longitudinal multiple-informant family study to examine the impact of exposure to mothers' and fathers' drinking on young children's normative perc...

Objective: The Drinking Motives Questionnaire-Revised (DMQ-R; Cooper, 1994) is frequently used to assess adult drinking motives despite being designed for younger drinkers. This study aimed to develop and validate a Drinking Motives Questionnaire for Adults (DMQ-A). Method: A convenience sample of 1,617 adults (25-65-year-olds; Mage = 51.4, SD =...

Aims Previous research has shown mixed results (positive, negative or no effects) regarding socio-economic disparities in adolescent drunkenness. This study investigates whether family affluence is differently associated with frequency of adolescent drunkenness in traditional countries, at a later diffusion of innovation adopter stage according to...

Alcohol consumption among midlife women has become an area of research focus. We suggest it is important to examine the social roles that many midlife women take on – specifically working mothers. Working mothers balance both employment and the unequal burden of caring/domestic duties, leading to ‘double shifts’ of paid and unpaid labor. This creat...

Background: The possibility of residual impairment of cognitive performance after multiday drinking sessions is particularly important given the potential for the deleterious effects of fatigue and hangover. This pilot study aimed to devise a methodology to compare sober performance on driving-relevant attentional tasks at the end of a 4-day music...

Background In the context of global declines in alcohol consumption, studies have recently shown that middle-aged women's alcohol use has increased in the past decade. Limited research has focused on this demographic group. We aimed to understand the perspectives of women aged 40–65 years on the role of alcohol in their lives and their motivations...

Objectives: To date, there have been no previous studies examining sex differences in the development of alcohol-related perceptions over time, a potential avenue for targeted prevention and early intervention efforts. This article examines any potential sex differences in young children's development of situational drinking norms over time. Meth...

Introduction: Recent trends in Australian national survey data show an increase in alcohol use among middle-aged people, amidst declines in alcohol use among other population groups. There is limited research, however, on middle-aged women's alcohol use. This study aimed to examine patterns in alcohol use among Australian women aged 40-65 and the...

Aims: To further disentangle the role of exposure to drinking of role models (parents, peers, best friends) in the development of young adolescent alcohol use, the current study examined (a) whether parent's alcohol use exposure was associated with alcohol use outcomes among adolescents and (b) whether this association remained significant when in...

Alcohol expectancies are well-established determinants of alcohol consumption. Traditionally, expectancies were assessed using self-report questionnaires. However, researchers have increasingly begun to explore the use of pictographic assessments, for example, the revised Alcohol Expectancy Task [rAET]. The current research aimed to examine the fac...

This study examined the association of social norms (i.e., descriptive and injunctive norms) and perceived risk with alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use in a sample of 378 Argentinean adolescents (60.3% girls, mean age 15.26 [SD = 1.26]). We conducted descriptive, correlation, and multivariate (i.e., hierarchical regression) analyses to describe su...

Introduction Transdermal alcohol monitors can help overcome issues with self-reporting in alcohol research and offer improvements over other biometric monitors as they provide passive and continuous measurement. The ION Wearable has recently entered the market by Milo Sensors; however, user acceptability has yet to be tested. This paper explores us...

Introduction Previous studies validating the transdermal alcohol concentration (TAC) as measured by the Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitors Continuous Alcohol Monitoring (SCRAM-CAM) have tested the monitor against self-reports or breath alcohol concentration (BrAC). This study aims to provide further evidence of the reliability of the SCRAM-C...

Introduction: Previous studies have demonstrated relationships between social and environmental characteristics of the drinking context and alcohol use. However, the use of event-level data to investigate individual and joint relationships between such characteristics and alcohol use remains a gap in the literature. This study aimed to examine ass...

Determining the prevalence of alcohol-related content on social media is important to guide education initiatives and interventions in this space. We aimed to assess the performance of the pre-developed alcoholic beverage identification deep learning algorithm (ABDILA) to automatically quantify alcoholic beverage prevalence in user-generated Instag...

Introduction: Most evidence on associations between alcohol use behaviors and the characteristics of its social and physical context is based on self-reports from study participants and, thus, only account for their subjective impressions of the situation. This study explores the feasibility of obtaining alternative measures of loudness, brightnes...

Aim To systematically develop and test stimuli for inclusion within the revised Alcohol Expectancy Task (rAET)-a pictographic assessment of alcohol-related beliefs.Using a UK adult sample of regular social drinkers, this paper documents the (1) selection (2)development and (3)testing of stimuli, along with (4)initial validation of the rAET. Method...

Introduction Pre-drinking increases alcohol use on drinking nights, which is associated with various adverse alcohol-related consequences but what motivates people to do so, i.e. the role of pre-drinking motives (PDM) in this link, is unclear. The current study examined a) the association of three PDM factors (fun/intoxication, facilitation, and co...

The possibility of residual impairment of cognitive performance after alcohol-licensed multi-day music events is particularly important given that many patrons drive home. We aimed to compare performance on driving-relevant cognitive tasks at the end of a four-day festival with performance at varying levels of the breath-alcohol curve. Participants...

Determining the prevalence of alcohol-related content on social media is important to guide education initiatives and interventions in this space. We aimed to assess the performance of the pre-developed alcoholic beverage identification deep learning algorithm (ABDILA) to automatically quantify alcoholic beverage prevalence in user-generated Instag...

Background: Combining work and family demands often results in conflicts increasing alcohol use. However, extreme levels of conflict may be associated with low volumes consumed. This study tests such an inverse u-shaped relationship and whether this is influenced by the source from which the conflicts mainly arise (family duties and/or work obliga...

Based on the assumptions of emotion regulation theory, this study tests whether drinking to cope mediates the association between work-family conflict (WFC) and alcohol use; an important link missing in previous studies. Based on a sample of 144 fathers and 165 mothers of pre-schoolers in Switzerland, Poisson regression mediation models were estima...

At least in Western societies, alcohol consumption is part and parcel of celebrations and social gatherings. Social norms around alcohol use - when, for whom and how much drinking is appropriate or not - assist us in navigating social interactions and help us to manage even unfamiliar situations by providing general behavioral guidance. However, wh...

Introduction and Aims Drinks consumed in real life are diverse, in terms of beverage type, container size and alcohol by volume. To date, most ecological momentary assessment studies have assessed drinking amounts with ‘standard’ drinks, although their event‐level design allows for more advanced assessment schemes. The purpose of this empirical stu...

Introduction and Aims Comprehensively investigating alcohol‐related behaviours in the context of a dynamic multi‐day alcohol‐licensed event is important for understanding and minimising patron risk. We aimed to assess the measurement utility of implementing a multi‐dimensional alcohol assessment battery using biometric data collection, real‐time dr...

Introduction and Aims Restrictions introduced to reduce the spread of COVID‐19 have had major impacts on the living circumstances of Australians. This paper aims to provide insight into shifts in alcohol consumption and associated factors during the epidemic. Design and Methods A cross‐sectional convenience sample of 2307 Australians aged 18 and o...

Background and aim: The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on alcohol consumption is currently unclear. This study aimed to provide early estimates of how stress and demographics will interact with shifts in harmful alcohol consumption from before the COVID-19 outbreak to 2 months into social distancing. Design: Cross-sectional convenience sample....

Background Informed by literature on venue design and ‘nudging’ in the context of choice architecture, the purpose of this article is to investigate the physical design of, and practices enacted within, sports bars to provide some indication as to whether these venues are spaces that encourage risky drinking and betting. Methods Our analysis draws...

Introduction and aims: By the time young adolescents initiate alcohol consumption they have firmly established attitudes, expectations and beliefs about alcohol and its effects. To further unravel the origins of this knowledge in childhood, we aim to address Dutch children's knowledge of the types of alcoholic beverages adults typically consume in...

Shortly after young adolescents initiate alcohol use, we investigated whether (1) drinking motives are associated with current alcohol use and binge drinking, (2) motives predict these alcohol outcomes 6 months later, and (3) alcohol outcomes predict motives 6 months later. Data on adolescents' drinking motives and alcohol use were drawn from a Dut...

Aims: There is new interest in measuring alcohol consumption during risky drinking events, but there is little guidance on how to best ask such questions. In this study, we contrast two different types of questions on peak consumption over a single heavy drinking occasion. We used a general question that ask respondents to recall the total amount...

Background Research on alcohol consumption mostly relies on self‐reported data, which are subject to recall bias. Wearable transdermal alcohol concentration (TAC) monitors address this limitation by continuously measuring the ethanol excreted via the skin. This systematic review aims to provide an overview of TAC monitors’ reliability to detect alc...

Introduction The subjective effects of alcohol, i.e., alcohol expectancies (AE), are important predictors of alcohol use. This three-year longitudinal study examined: 1) the development of enhancement, social, coping, and conformity AE from age 10–16; 2) the association between parental alcohol use exposure and positive AE among adolescents and bet...

The aim of this paper is to explore whether in the eyes of young adolescents the consumption of different alcoholic beverages is associated with different alcohol expectancies, namely beliefs on what emotional outcomes take place when alcohol is consumed. 283 nine to 12-year olds from Switzerland completed the Alcohol Expectancy Task (AET). Partici...

This paper explores home as a space of youth nightlife and drinking through a feminist lens. It draws on feminist geographical scholarship on home and 40 semi-structured interviews with young people aged 16–25 in Switzerland in the context of a larger interdisciplinary study. We find that the home figures as a central space of nightlife for young p...

Background: Evidence demonstrates that seeing alcoholic beverages in electronic media increases alcohol initiation and frequent and excessive drinking, particularly among young people. To efficiently assess this exposure, the aim was to develop the Alcoholic Beverage Identification Deep Learning Algorithm (ABIDLA) to automatically identify beer, w...

Background and aims: Repeated cross-sectional surveys have identified substantial declines in adolescent drinking in Australia and some other countries in recent years. There is debate about whether these declines will be maintained as the cohort ages. This study modelled alcohol consumption over time to check for cohort effects reflecting a decre...

Aims: Limited cross-sectional studies have indicated that young children have some knowledge of the type of situations in which adults usually consume alcohol. However, it is unclear when and how this knowledge develops over time. This study tests the hypothesis that between the ages of 4 and 8, children become more knowledgeable about common drin...

During adolescence, interpersonal stressors such as peer rejection pose challenges to emotion regulation. Yet, very little is known about how these transactional processes unfold in adolescents’ daily lives. This study investigated adolescents’ (a) emotional reactivity to daily perceptions of peer rejection, which concerns concurrent changes in neg...

Introduction and aims: Research has linked exposure to the drinking of one's partner or spouse and changes in alcohol-related behaviours. However, there is a dearth of studies which consider only cohabiting relationships. More couples are preferring to cohabit prior to and in place of marriage. As a result, studies focused on cohabiting couples ma...

To resolve the mixed findings on the link between social anxiety (SA) and alcohol use, studies have examined the role of post-event processing (PEP), i.e., negative thinking about past social events. In a sample of 18–30 year olds (82% female) high (n = 40) and low (n = 49) in SA, the current 21-day study assessed the effect of PEP after social dri...

Background: Alcohol expectancies (AE), that is, the anticipated effects of alcohol, start developing early in childhood and are important predictors of alcohol use years later. Whereas previous research has demonstrated that parental drinking relates to children's AE, this study aims to test whether exposure to parental alcohol use mediates the li...

Background: The amount of alcohol consumed during an occasion can be influenced by physical and social attributes of the setting, characteristics and state of individuals, and the interactions of these components. This systematic review identifies and describes the specific combinations and sequences of context-related factors that are associated...

Aims: This exploratory study aims to model the impact of sex and age on the percentage of pre-drinking in 27 countries, presenting a single model of pre-drinking behaviour for all countries and then comparing the role of sex and age on pre-drinking behaviour between countries. Methods: Using data from the Global Drug Survey, the percentages of p...

Aims This exploratory study aims to model the impact of sex and age on the percentage of pre-drinking in 27 countries, presenting a single model of pre-drinking behaviour for all countries and then comparing the role of sex and age on pre-drinking behaviour between countries. Methods Using data from the Global Drug Survey, the percentages of pre-...

Background: Many addictive behaviours are influenced by the context in which they occur, but methods for simultaneously capturing the characteristics of a behaviour and its context are scarce. This study describes a smartphone application developed to document young adults’ nightlife and drinking behaviours and investigates its impact on participan...

BACKGROUND Recent research has investigated the utility of mobile phone-delivered interventions for reducing risky single occasion drinking (RSOD, also known as binge drinking). In the past five years, focus has been placed on Ecological Momentary Interventions (EMI), which aim to deliver intervention content in correspondence to real-time assessme...

Background: Recent research has investigated the utility of mobile phone-delivered interventions for reducing risky single-occasion drinking, also known as binge drinking. In the past five years, focus has been placed on ecological momentary interventions (EMIs), which aim to deliver intervention content in correspondence to real-time assessments...

Despite human geographers’ growing recognition of the need to explore how digital technologies are increasingly co‐producing geographies, the methodological implications of such forms of data production are rarely discussed. This paper explores how smartphones co‐constitute fieldwork when they are used as research instruments. Drawing from a resear...

Background and Aims Previous studies have found that in some countries ‘drinking pace’ (number of drinks consumed per hour) increases over the course of an evening. We aimed to provide evidence of this acceleration from a culture in which binge drinking is prevalent and to test whether this is consistent across gender, day of week, and in high‐risk...

Introduction: Transdermal alcohol monitors, such as Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitors (SCRAMs), enable continuous measurement of alcohol consumption in participants’ natural environments free from recall bias and response burden. This paper explores young research participants’ experience of wearing SCRAMs to provide insights into the poten...

Background Balancing contradictory demands of different social roles such as work and family can lead to role conflicts. However, whether such conflicts lead to detrimental alcohol use may depend on the individual's gender role attitudes (GRA). For example, considering family care taking as a female task, and breadwinning as a male task. This study...

Drinking heavily in a short period is associated with significant health risks. However, little is known about when heavy drinking occurs during an evening. Recently, research found that individuals increase their drinking pace across the evening, speeding up their drinking. The current study examines whether this speeding up is different depending...

Anhand einer national-repräsentativen Stichprobe der Schweiz werden Zusammen- hänge zwischen subjektiv wahrgenommener Arbeitsüberforderung bzw. -unzufrie- denheit und demografischen, klassen- sowie schulbezogenen Faktoren untersucht, und Angaben von 534 Lehrpersonen der 5. bis 9. Schulstufe und deren Klassen mit multiplen linearen Regressionsmodell...

Objective: The aim of the present study was to test the link between exposure to parental alcohol use (i.e., preteens seeing their parents drinking) and preteen's alcohol use. Specifically, this study aimed to (a) replicate the association between parental alcohol use and preteen alcohol use and (b) test whether alcohol use exposure mediated this...

While risky drinking in adolescence has been found to be rooted in childhood, evidence is scarce regarding where early alcohol-related knowledge originates. This study investigates preschoolers' alcohol-related knowledge about beverage names, content and social norms (i.e. drinking to be common among men and at parties) depending on parental alcoho...

Background: Real-time ecological momentary interventions have shown promising effects in domains other than alcohol use; however, only few studies regarding ecological momentary interventions for alcohol use have been conducted thus far. The increasing popularity of smartphones offers new avenues for intervention and innovation in data collection....

Objective: Young people often drink more alcohol than intended over the course of a night. This study investigates individual and night-specific factors predicting young people's acknowledgment of having drunk more than intended. Method: Using the Youth@Night smartphone application, 176 people aged 16-25 documented 757 Friday and Saturday nights...

Background and Aims The threshold of 4+/5+ drinks per occasion has been used for decades in alcohol research to distinguish between non‐risky vs. risky episodic drinking. However, no study has assessed the validity of this threshold using event‐level data. This study aimed to determine the optimal thresholds for the detection of five acute alcohol‐...

Introduction and Aims Several European countries have observed an increase in the proportion of adolescents that abstain from drinking alcohol in the last decade. The reasons for this trend remain underexplored. We hypothesised that more generous government expenditures on health services and benefits to families with children relate to a positive...

Successful emotion regulation (ER) is a central aspect of psychosocial functioning and mental health and is thought to improve and be refined in adolescence. Past research on ER has mainly focused on one-time measurements of habitual ER. Linking regulatory strategies to emotions in daily lives is key to understanding adolescents’ emotional lives. U...

Alcohol use and risky single occasion drinking are common among adolescents and are associated with a higher risk of various negative social, physical, academic, or sexual consequences. Studies have shown that among college students, willingness to experience negative consequences is associated with a higher likelihood of experiencing these consequ...

Purpose: Developmental changes in alcohol expectancies (AE) have been proposed to lead to alcohol use initiation and later alcohol use in adolescence. This systematic review aims to provide longitudinal evidence of the development of AE and the relation of AE to alcohol outcomes from childhood to late adolescence (4-18 years old). Methods: A com...

Alcohol consumption is the number one risk factor for morbidity and mortality among young people. In late adolescence and early adulthood, excessive drinking and intoxication are more common than in any other life period, increasing the risk of adverse physical and psychological health consequences. In this paper, we examine the feasibility of usin...

Background: Research has found that children as young as preschoolers have an idea about the valence (positive vs. negative) and activation (arousal vs. sedation) of emotional change when adults drink alcohol. The development of alcohol expectancies at such a young age may be due to observed parental alcohol use. Methods: Three measures of alcoh...

Background and aims Recent studies have argued that there has been substantial gender convergence in alcohol consumption. However, many of these rely on comparisons of different cohorts and do not adjust for age differences in male and female drinking patterns. We aimed to examine 1) whether the gender gap in risky drinking in Australia narrowed be...