Trauma, Resilience, and the Reinforcing Value of Alcohol

A translational test of whether cumulative trauma burden and psychological resilience shape how much motivational value young adults place on alcohol.

R. Gulbankian, J. Cotsonas, J. LaPlante, and S. Charntikov · Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire · Presented at the Research Society on Alcohol, San Antonio, 2026

The question

For the past decade our preclinical work has shown that individual differences in stress reactivity predict later drug demand, first for heroin and then for ethanol, even when group averages show nothing. This study asks whether the same logic holds in people. Does the cumulative psychological impact of trauma, not whether trauma occurred but how heavily it was carried, predict the motivational value a young adult places on alcohol, and does resilience change that relationship?

What we did

We recruited college students with past-year alcohol use and measured alcohol demand with the Alcohol Purchase Task, deriving Essential Value as the primary index of how persistently a person pursues alcohol as its price rises. We quantified cumulative trauma impact as the summed severity of endorsed traumatic events rather than a simple count, and we measured resilience with the Brief Resilience Scale. We then tested whether trauma and resilience each contribute to demand on their own, after accounting for demographics and how much people actually drink.

What we are seeing

Three patterns stand out. Greater cumulative trauma impact is associated with more persistent demand for alcohol. Resilience, contrary to the usual assumption that it buffers risk, is associated with higher demand as well once trauma severity is held constant. And the link between trauma and drinking appears to run through demand itself, which suggests that the reinforcing value of alcohol is part of how stress translates into use. These results are preliminary and the manuscript is in preparation, so we describe direction here rather than specific numbers.

Figure 1. Alcohol demand in the sample. Each curve traces how reported consumption falls as price rises; the spread in Essential Value shows how much individuals differ in the persistence of their demand.
Figure 2. A pathway from trauma to drinking. The association between cumulative trauma impact and weekly drinking runs in part through Essential Value, the reinforcing value of alcohol.

Why it matters

Two people can report the same weekly drinking yet differ sharply in how hard they would work to keep drinking as it becomes costly. Demand captures that difference, and these findings suggest it carries a signature of stress history that consumption measures miss. That points toward demand-based phenotyping as a practical way to identify stress-related alcohol vulnerability early, and it carries our laboratory’s preclinical framework into a human, prevention-oriented setting.

The poster

Poster coming soon

The full RSA 2026 poster will be available here during the conference.

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This study is part of a broader research direction in the lab: Translating Demand to the Clinic: Stress, Resilience, and Alcohol Motivation in Young Adults.

Manuscript in preparation. Please do not cite or circulate without permission. This work was conducted while S. Charntikov was partially supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIDA/NIGMS; Award #1R15DA056871-01).