What happens to your brain when you drink with friends? UTEP study shows how social drinking boosts euphoria

EL PASO, Texas (KVIA) -- By using fruit flies, a team of UTEP faculty and students researched the neurobiological process behind social drinking and how it boosts feelings of euphoria. The study identifies the region of the brain that is stimulated by social drinking. The study says that tipsy fruit flies aren’t that different from intoxicated humans, according to a UTEP biologist.

Researchers think they now know why grabbing a drink with friends at happy hour can likely make you feel chatty, friendly and upbeat, but grabbing a drink alone may make you experience feelings of depression. “Social settings influence how individuals react to alcohol, yet there is no mechanistic study on how and why this occurs,” said Kyung-An Han, Ph.D., a biologist at The University of Texas at El Paso who uses fruit flies to study alcoholism. 

According to the UTEP study this may lead to a better understanding of how humans become vulnerable to Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD). That disease affected nearly 29.5 million people just in 2023, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. 

Fruit flies are insects that share about 75% of the same genes that cause human diseases, Han explained. Therefore, by using fruit flies, Han and her team say they wanted to demonstrate that ethanol, which is the alcohol in drinks, causes different reactions in solitary versus group settings and that dopamine, the brain molecule that plays a role in pleasure, motivation and learning, is a key player for this phenomenon.

The team found that "the flies, regardless of whether they had normal or increased levels of dopamine, had a similar reaction to ethanol in a solitary setting — a tiny increase in activity. But in social settings, the flies with increased dopamine showed even more heightened hyperactivity than usual." Dr. Han says that with this study they demonstrated that both social settings and dopamine act together for the flies’ more intense response to ethanol.

“Our work is providing scientific knowledge to support the idea that the brain interprets and processes a person’s social surrounding and has that signal converge into the dopamine system that is also activated by alcohol consumption,” said Paul Rafael Sabandal, Ph.D., a research assistant professor in biological sciences and one of the study’s corresponding authors. “It gives us as researchers an idea of which brain area and components may serve as the meeting point for all the signals that contribute to AUD.”