Methods for evaluating general abilities and overall intelligence have been in use for more than a century, and continue to be employed regularly today (Strauss et al., 2006; Lezak et al., 2012). Here we describe examples from research that has looked at general abilities in the study of long-term chronic alcoholism, and we conclude that their utility in characterizing deficits in alcoholism has been limited, in part because of the variety of functions they assess.
