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Activation of alcohol-related associative networks by recent alcohol consumption and alcohol-related cues
1Department of Psychology, Southampton University, UK. spg@soton.ac.uk
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.