A number of recent reviews (e.g., Leeman et al., 2010; Litten et al., 2012; Stephens et al., 2010) discuss the need to examine the effects of compounds under more than one self-administration procedure. This allows for greater pharmacological differentiation in treatment effectiveness. For instance, naltrexone’s ability to reduce acute ethanol reinforcement/reward would appear to target “too much too fast” ethanol intake (c.f., O’Malley and Froehlich, 2003) and acamprosate’s effectiveness in severely dependent subjects, as well as its ability to interfere with excessive but not moderate consumption by rats (Rimondini et al., 2002), would appear to target “too much too often” ethanol intake (c.f., DeWitte et al., 2005). Refining the level of measurement (e.g., licking rate) may also facilitate medications development and the translatability of findings to the clinical condition (Leeman et al., 2010; Litten et al., 2012; Stephens et al., 2010). For example, it has been shown that allopregnanolone, while not altering the overall amount of ethanol consumed, at moderate to high doses reduced licking frequency and high doses reduced bout sizes in mice (Ford et al., 2008). Several of
