Activation of alcohol-related associative networks by recent alcohol consumption and alcohol-related cues.

AIMS

To investigate the influence of recent alcohol consumption and alcohol-related cues on performance in a sentence generation task.

DESIGN

Two experiments were carried out. In the first, the performances of light, moderate and heavy drinkers were compared. In the second, subjects were randomly assigned to one of three experimental treatments (alcohol-priming, non-alcohol priming, and control) and classified as light, moderate or heavy drinkers. The effect of experimental treatment, drinking status, gender and the interaction between these factors was studied.

SETTING

The experiments were carried out in quiet research rooms in psychology departments.

PARTICIPANTS

Volunteers recruited from university campuses.

MEASUREMENTS

Questionnaires were used to ascertain recent drinking histories. Subjects generated sentences incorporating ambiguous alcohol-related words which were provided by the experimenter. The sentences were then classified as alcohol-related or not, the dependent measure was the number of alcohol-related sentences produced.

FINDINGS

In both experiments heavier drinkers produced more alcohol-related sentences and males produced more alcohol-related sentences than females. In the second experiment more alcohol-related sentences were produced after subjects were exposed the alcohol priming condition.

CONCLUSIONS

The alcohol-related meaning of ambiguous words is more likely to be accessed by males and by heavier drinkers and after exposure to other alcohol cues.