Does drinking have effects on mood and cognition in male and female students?

Self-ratings of mood and bodily symptoms were made by groups of IQ and education-matched male and female students [teetotal, low (2–9 units/week for both sexes; 1 UK unit=8 g alcohol) and moderate (12–34 units/week for males; 10–24 units/week for females) drinkers], before the start and at the end of cognitive testing. Multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVAs) showed that there were significant Alcohol×Time interactions, because the teetotal group responded to the cognitive tests with greater increases in the factors of somatic anxiety and aggressive mood than did the other two groups. Thus, the teetotallers had greater ratings of anxiety, sweating, palpitations, irritability, headache, feeling angry, quarrelsome, belligerent, resentful, hostile, spiteful and rebellious. No differences were found in immediate or delayed logical memory, in verbal fluency, trails, clock-drawing or mental flexibility tests. In tests of sustained attention [rapid visual information processing (RVIP)] and planning, males performed better than females. The moderate-alcohol group performed better than the low-alcohol group in RVIP and planning (completed significantly more tasks in the minimum moves), although in the hardest parts of the latter test, they took longer in planning the initial move. In conclusion, there was no evidence that the group drinking moderate levels of alcohol had any cognitive impairment and the teetotal group responded to the cognitive tests with the greatest increases in negative mood.