Does alcohol-related desire thinking predict in-the-moment drinking behaviours?

Desire thinking (voluntary thinking involving a perseverative focusing on desired target-related memories, images, and information), is an important factor in the experience of drinking urges and cravings. Research has not examined the relationship between desire thinking, behavioural intention and the implementation of that behaviour into action, nor how one's past repeated behaviour in situ (expressed as habit) may moderate these relationships. We employed an ad libitum drinking paradigm to provide indirect measures of in-the-moment drinking behaviours (amount poured [mls] and amount consumed [mls]) in a group of eighty-eight self-defined social drinkers immediately after measuring self-reported drinking habit, drinking-related desire thinking, and general drinking behaviour. Results confirmed the predicted positive relationship between desire thinking and in-the-moment drinking behaviour with the effects increasing as a function of rising drinking habit strength. We also observed a dissociation between desire thinking components (verbal perseveration and imaginal prefiguration) in the moderating effects of habit strength on drinking behaviour. For imaginal prefiguration (thoughts related to construction of mental images of a desired target or of its context for consumption) a direct effect on drinking behaviours was shown. In comparison, the effect for verbal perseveration (repetitive self-talk regarding the need to achieve a desired target) was not shown to independently predict drinking-related behaviour but was significantly moderated by increasing drinking-related habit strength. Future work should formulate the nature of this moderating influence on perseverative goal-directed thinking.