Researchers ‘discover’ that hangovers don’t deter people from drinking again

We're looking forward to their 'Bears preference for woodland defecation' paper.

'Never again'. Often the first words out of our mouths on a Saturday or Sunday morning, the promise we make to ourselves to avoid ever enduring another hangover is solemn at the time, powered as it is by nausea, a headache and a solid dose of 'The Fear'. But fast forward a few hours, often only to lunchtime, and you are back on that boozy horse, with all thoughts of potential hangovers banished from your mind. Yes, we really are simple creatures. Anyway, now a team of researchers from the University of Missouri has proven that a hangover doesn't put people off having a drink. The BBC report that the researchers have published a study in a journal called Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research where they asked nearly 400 students to keep a three week drink diary. The students were asked to rate their likelihood of drinking each day and having a hangover that morning had no effect on their rating. They did note that some students had some blank pages though, and we can only guess why. They also found that most students didn't resort to 'the cure' to clear their hangover either. "Our findings fill in a basic piece of the puzzle concerning hangovers and alcoholism," researcher Thomas Piasecki told the Beeb. "If hangovers don't strongly discourage or punish drinking, links between current problem drinking and frequent hangover seem less incongruent. If hangovers don't generally hasten drinking, we can rule out a direct causal role of hangovers in the acceleration of problem drinking."