Professor Julia Martinez is looking forward to July 4, but it’s not necessarily because of the barbecues or fireworks. Actually, it’s what happens at those events that piques Martinez’s interest, because of their effect on her research. Martinez, assistant professor of psychology, studies drinking, specifically in the college-age group.
Julia Martinez, assistant professor of psychology
This summer, she is conducting four alcohol studies with the help of her students. Three of the studies are campus based, while the fourth is through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk global survey tool.
Two of Martinez’s studies focus on how college students use social reinforcement to influence their peers to drink and encourage pathological behavior that leads to alcohol use disorders.
In “How Is Facebook Used by College Students to Reinforce Drinking?” Martinez and Malin Lilley ’15 are examining how elements of a person’s Facebook profile and its traffic coincides with actual drinking (assessed through surveys).
Kristina Bodnar ’14 has teamed up with Martinez on “Drinking in the College Age Population: A Public Health Problem,” which asks participants to relate their most positive and negative drinking experiences in story format. “There is a lot of alcohol-related story data from people who have already reached alcoholism and tell stories of their own personal ‘rock-bottom.’ This is a novel look into it — asking people at the start of their drinking career about what types of [social or psychological] reinforcement they’re getting from drinking,” Martinez explained. “These two studies get at what it is about drinking in the college years that promotes a ‘drinking career,’ as we call it.”
Her third campus-based study, assisted by Noah Bacine ’13, takes a biological approach: “Investigating the Association among Executive Cognitive Functioning Behavioral Measures and Binge Drinking in College Students.”
“Alcohol use and alcohol use disorders are so prevalent during the 18- to 25-year-old range, but also, college is a time when people are developing their problem-solving abilities and decision-making skills,” Martinez explained. “These things are happening in tandem, so the point of this is to look at how these decision-making and problem-solving processes occur alongside different drinking behaviors.” She and Bacine are using neuropsychological tests like games and riddles as well as surveys in order to acquire their data.
To expand her research to a global platform, Martinez is using Mechanical Turk to gather data on the different drinking phenomena.
The campus studies will continue throughout the summer and into the fall.
“We will likely see an upsurge in drinking around July Fourth,” Martinez said. “Certain dates like that, New Year’s, and anyone’s twenty-first birthday tend to promote drinking.”