An important effort towards resolving discrepancies in the alcohol administration literature comes from the work of Newlin and Thompson (1990). In the context of their review of alcohol challenge studies of sons of alcohol dependent parents and controls, they proposed the influential differentiator model for understanding psychobiological responses to alcohol as a function of family history. This model can be applied more broadly, to conceptualizing individual differences in responses to alcohol. Newlin and Thompson’s (1990) differentiator model proposes that responses to alcohol may be accentuated during the rising blood alcohol curve (BAC) (i.e., acute sensitization) and attenuated during the falling BAC (i.e., acute tolerance). The authors propose that sons of alcohol dependent individuals may be both more sensitive to the rewarding effects of alcohol during the rising limb of the BAC and less sensitive to the unpleasant effects of alcohol when BAC is dropping. Importantly, acute tolerance and acute sensitization occur within session and represent a useful way to capture the “snap shot” of alcohol’s effects obtained in a single administration session. This model has influenced efforts to parse out
