Several other studies have failed to observe differences in the subjective response to alcohol across the menstrual cycle (e.g., Freitag and Adesso, 1993; Nyberg et al., 2004; see review by Terner and de Wit, 2006). In fact, one of the most carefully designed and controlled laboratory studies (Holdstock and de Wit, 2000) found no differences in the subjective response to alcohol across the menstrual cycle, despite using some of the same subjective questionnaires as the present study. In that study, women were also allowed to self-administer additional doses of alcohol, but there were no differences across the menstrual cycle in either the number of women choosing to drink or the number of additional drinks consumed. There are several possible explanations for the inconsistent findings between the two studies. First, in the present study, the response to acute doses of alcohol were tested over a 5-hour period on separate days, whereas a cumulative dosing procedure was used by Holdstock and de Wit (2000), in which a low dose of alcohol (0.2 g/kg) was administered every 30 min for a maximal dose
