The Effects of Alcohol and How it Effects College Students GPA - Research Paper Example

However, most studies show that there is a convincing relationship between alcohol and aggressiveness. This paper will focus on the effects of alcohol and how it affects college students GPA making use of findings from three different studies by Giancola, Porter and Pryor, as well as a study by Powell, Williams and Wechsler. Studies have been done among students by using different groups comprising of individuals given alcohol, placebo or non-alcoholic drinks, anti-placebo or persons given alcoholic drinks but made to believe that the drinks were anti-alcoholic and a last group of sober students.

Such studies proved that the group given alcohol demonstrated higher levels of aggressiveness followed by the anti-placebo group (Giancola, 2002). Most studies have thus concluded that alcohol induces aggressiveness among students. According to Giancola (2002), factor such as ones background and environment determines the probability of engaging in aggressive behavior after consuming alcohol since they define ones manner of coping with drunkenness. Study by Giancola (2002), and another by Powell, William, and Wechsler (2002) agreed that there is a connection between alcohol consumption with tumbling performance amongst students, which could be direct by affecting intellectual capability or indirectly by affecting students’ schooling and study habits.

Giancola (2002, p. 130) argues, “Executive functioning mediates the alcohol-aggression relation in that acute alcohol intoxication disrupts executive functioning, which then heightens the probability of aggression”. He further concedes that severe consumption of alcohol increases chances of aggressiveness in medium and low more than in high executive functioning persons. Porter and Pryor (2007), argue that college students overindulge in episodic drinking which makes them aggressive. Giancola disputes this and argues that alcohol is “less likely to engender aggression” since “alcohol will not facilitate any behaviors for which there is no psychological predisposition” (Giancola, 2002, p. 132). Powell, Williams, and Wechsler (2002) posit that impairment of perceptive capacity resulting from alcohol consumption influences academic performance deleteriously which is contrary (Giancola) (Porter and Pryor) (Powell, Williams, & Wechsler, 2002) to Giancola’s (2002) findings that acute alcohol does not unswervingly cause direct effects but interacts with other variables to cause impaired brain functioning resulting in aggression or decreased performance.

Porter and Pryor (2007, p. 457), claim that “males are more likely than female to report 3 or 4 or more occasions of heavy drinking, whereas females at women’s college are less likely to report heavy episodic drinking compared with females at research universities or coed colleges.” Their study results showed that 30% of females from women’s colleges indulge in episodic drinking while 56% males from coed college are episodic drinkers. Porter and Pryor (2007, p. 458), study showed that “students who reported drinking heavily tended to have lower GPAs” as compared to non-drinker students irrespective of their diversities in gender, racial, marital or year of study.

Porter and Pryor (2007) study showed that students who engaged in drinking