Alcohol and anxiety: postdrink-performance feedback alters affective and self-evaluative responses to a subsequent...

Several models of alcohol use and abuse implicate self-evaluation as a variable that mediates alcohol's anxiolytic effects. Self-evaluation when drinking, in turn, is affected by people's causal attributions for their behavior and alcohol expectancies. Accordingly, postdrink performance feedback was manipulated by having 20 subjects engage in a set of tasks before and after a moderate dose of alcohol. Half of the subjects received feedback that alcohol impaired their task performance whereas the other half received feedback that alcohol did not impair their performance. All subjects then participated in a stressful social interaction. As expected, subjects in the high behavioral impairment condition made more external performance attributions during the social stressor and reported less negative self-evaluation and subjective anxiety than subjects in the low behavioral impairment condition. Alcohol expectancies appeared to account partially for the data. The results indicate that information concerning alcohol-induced behavioral impairment moderates alcohol's effects on self-evaluation and subjective anxiety.