“…Many clinical (Ballenger and Post, 1978;Brown et al, 1988;Malcolm et al, 2000a, b) and animal studies (Maier and Pohorecky, 1989;McCown and Breese, 1990;Becker and Hale, 1993;Kokka et al, 1993;Becker et al, 1997Becker et al, , 1998Meert and Huysmans, 1994;Ulrichsen et al, 1998) support the concept that the increased seizure susceptibility following multiple withdrawals from chronic ethanol resembles a kindling process. Based upon the implication that symptoms of withdrawal other than seizure susceptibility also increase over time in alcoholics (Ballenger and Post, 1978), subsequent experiments showed that repeated withdrawals from chronic ethanol diet over three periods of 5 days, with 2 days of withdrawal between cycles, reduced social interaction between 5 and 6 h after ethanol removal from the final ethanol exposure (Overstreet et al, 2002).…”