The Self-Rating of the Effects of Alcohol (SRE) scale was developed by Schuckit and colleagues (Schuckit et al., 1997) to operationalize an individual’s alcohol sensitivity by quantifying the number of standard alcoholic drinks necessary to experience physiological effects of alcohol, such as dizziness and slurring; it does not capture all dimensions of intoxication. Higher scores reflect the need to consume a higher volume of alcohol to experience those effects – that is, lower sensitivity to alcohol per drink. Importantly, there is evidence that this sensitivity is heritable: Individuals with a family history of alcohol problems exhibit less pronounced alcohol sensitivity (Schuckit, 1980; Schuckit, 1984; Schuckit et al., 2003; Schuckit et al., 2000; Schuckit et al., 1996) across a variety of assessments, including the SRE (Schuckit et al., 2003). We are aware of only one twin study of alcohol response (Heath et al., 1999) in adulthood, which reported a heritability of 0.6. Furthermore, linkage studies have identified loci associated with SRE (Ehlers et al., 2010; Schuckit et al., 2001), and variants in GABRA2 were nominally associated with both subjective and objective
