An observational study in Alcohol Drinking, Alcohol Use Disorder and Alcohol Intoxication, sponsored by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Active, not recruiting at 1 site in United States. Open to participants aged 21 Years to 30 Years, including healthy volunteers. Per ClinicalTrials.gov, last updated 2026-05-04.
Sponsored by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign · Observational
In this study, the investigators aim to capture inter- and intra-brain mechanisms underlying alcohol reward in novel social context.
Objective: Alcohol's ability to boost mood in the face of stress is perhaps its most notoriously addictive property, long held by researchers to be of critical importance for understanding alcohol use disorder (AUD) etiology. Yet, while most real-world alcohol consumption occurs in social settings, in the context of laboratory studies, participants have almost always consumed alcohol alone. The discrepancy between real-world and laboratory contexts emerges as particularly stark in the neuroimaging literature, where no alcohol-administration study to date has incorporated in-vivo social context. In this first alcohol-administration study to leverage EEG hyperscanning methods, the investigators aim to capture inter- and intra-brain mechanisms underlying alcohol reward in novel social context.
Specifically, this study aims to characterize the mechanisms driving social reward from alcohol in the context of stress and elucidate the role of social processes and novel social context in driving problem drinking.
Study Population: Participants will consist of 240 regular drinkers, aged 21-30, with no reported history of severe alcohol use disorder.
Design: In the laboratory arm of the study, individuals will be randomly assigned to consume either a moderate dose of alcohol or a control beverage in stranger dyads. Participants will engage in both structured and unstructured tasks aimed at assessing social engagement and threat sensitivity. EEG and ERP data will be collected from both participants simultaneously. In the ambulatory study arm, participants will wear transdermal sensors to assess BAC and will further provide information about their mood and their social contexts in response to random prompts.
Outcome Measures: Primary outcome measures include EEG measures of inter-brain entrainment as well as ERP metrics derived from task contexts (both players and observers). Additional outcomes include measures of positive mood, negative mood, and social bonding. Finally, drinking behaviors will be assessed via transdermal ambulatory alcohol sensors and longitudinal self-reports of drinking.
1,674 studies on the registry are indexed under Alcoholism; 331 are open to participants now.
This study's planned enrollment of 240 is above the median of 159 across 183 observational studies indexed under Alcoholism.
Browse Alcoholism studies →University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the lead sponsor of 191 studies on the registry; 29 are open to participants now.
Compared within Alcoholism, this study's primary condition as ClinicalTrials.gg classifies it; the registry's first condition term is Alcohol Drinking. The counts are of registry records indexed under each term, refreshed daily. How we classify →
Healthy regular drinkers aged 21-30
Go through the criteria one by one — yes, no or not sure — and take the list to your doctor or the study team. Kept in this browser only.
Exclusion Criteria:
Inter-brain entrainment
The association between dyad-members EEG signals during the hyperscanning task
Time frame: During active laboratory beverage manipulation exposure (during or immediately after beverage administration, at which time participants in the alcohol condition will register a positive BAC)
Feedback-related negativity
An ERP component calculated from a time-estimation task
Time frame: During active laboratory beverage manipulation exposure (during or immediately after beverage administration, at which time participants in the alcohol condition will register a positive BAC)
Ambulatory Drinking
Drinking behavior assessed outside the laboratory using ambulatory assessment
Time frame: 14 days
Longitudinal Drinking Problems
Drinking assessed at longitudinal follow-up
Time frame: Up to 24 months post-baseline
Plan to share: Yes — Data is being shared on the National Institute of Mental Health Data Archive
Data sharing details ↗ · nda.nih.gov
This study is active, not recruiting, as verified in Apr 2026. You cannot join it, but the record below documents what was studied.
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign →