These probands were originally recruited as ~20 year old Caucasian or Hispanic, drinking but not alcohol-dependent men through questionnaires mailed to random students and nonacademic staff at the University of California, San Diego between 1978 and 1988 (Schuckit and Gold, 1988; Schuckit and Smith, 2000). They were chosen so that about 50% of the probands had an alcohol dependent father and half the subjects did not have a biological parent or grandparent with alcohol dependence. No subjects met criteria for a major depressive or major anxiety disorder when tested at baseline. Participants were evaluated in person with a semi-structured interview based on several validated instruments, after which all participated in an alcohol challenge with 0.75ml/kg (0.61gm/kg) of ethanol, consumed over 8–10 minutes to evaluate their LR over three hours through self-reports of subjective feelings of intoxication, alterations in body sway/standing steadiness, and alcohol-related changes in cortisol (Schuckit and Gold, 1988; Schuckit and Smith, 2000).
