Methods of inducing binge-like drinking with alcohol range from having animals drink alcohol solutions that are made more palatable with the addition of a sweetener (Ji et al. 2008) to restricting intake to specific periods of the dark cycle (drinking in the dark; Rhodes et al. 2005) to models involving alcohol dependence in animals such as alcohol vapor inhalation, intragastric alcohol infusion, and alcohol-liquid diet. The compulsive use of alcohol derives from multiple sources of reinforcement, and animal models have been developed not only for the acute positive reinforcing effects of ethanol, but also for the negative reinforcing effects associated with removal of the aversive effects of ethanol withdrawal or an existing aversive state (i.e., self-medication of the aversive effects of abstinence from chronic ethanol or self-medication of a pre-existing negative affective state; Koob and Le Moal 1997). A major early breakthrough was the development of a training procedure involving access to a sweetened solution and a subsequent fading in of ethanol to avoid the aversiveness of the ethanol taste (for review, see Samson 1987). Subsequent work extended these procedures to measures of self-administration in dependent rats and post-dependent rats (Roberts et al. 1996; O’Dell et al. 2004).
