Alcohol belongs here: Assessing alcohol-related inhibitory control with a contextual go/no-go task.

Charlotte R Pennington,Derek Heim,Adam W Qureshi,Rebecca L Monk

doi:10.1037/pha0000256

Charlotte R Pennington, Derek Heim + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1037/pha0000256

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Abstract

There is a growing awareness of the need to explore the social and environmental milieus that drive alcohol consumption and related cognitions. The current study examined the extent to which alcohol-congruent and incongruent drinking contexts modulate alcohol-related inhibitory control using a novel go/no-go task. One hundred and eight participants (Mage = 20 years; SD = 4.87) were instructed to inhibit their responses to visual alcoholic (alcohol/no-go condition, n = 50) or nonalcoholic stimuli (alcohol/go condition, n = 58) depicted in an alcohol-congruent (pub), incongruent (library), or context-free (control) condition. Participants in the alcohol/go condition exhibited higher false alarm rates (FAR) toward nonalcoholic stimuli and faster reaction times (RTs) to alcoholic stimuli depicted in the alcohol-congruent and incongruent context compared with the alcohol/no-go condition. In contrast, FAR toward alcoholic stimuli (alcohol/no-go condition) were not significantly affected by drinking context, but RT was faster when nonalcoholic stimuli were presented in alcohol-incongruent (i.e., library) compared with alcohol-congruent (i.e., pub) contexts. The discussion turns to potential explanations for these findings, suggesting that social drinkers might exhibit approach tendencies toward alcoholic images that translate into errors toward nonalcoholic stimuli, and that image complexity influences response inhibition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Highlights

When people think about consuming alcohol, they may envisage the characteristics of the drink, and contextual factors such as their social drinking environment and associated sights, sounds and smells
The current study investigated the influence of drinking context on alcohol-related cue reactivity, with an explicit focus on inhibitory control
There is a growing awareness that social and environmental milieus exert an important influence on alcohol consumption behaviours

Summary

Introduction

When people think about consuming alcohol, they may envisage the characteristics of the drink, and contextual factors such as their social drinking environment and associated sights, sounds and smells. Consumption is less well remembered retrospectively when drinking takes place in a pub compared to at home (Monk, Heim, Qureshi & Price, 2015) One explanation for this pattern of findings is that the presence of other people and the desire to socialise may enhance the positive effects of alcohol, which in turn enriches the value of associated social stimuli (de Wit & Sayette, 2018). This work indicates consistently that both social and problem drinkers exhibit impairments in inhibitory control when required to inhibit responses towards visual alcoholic relative to non-alcoholic stimuli (Christiansen, Cole, & Field, 2012; Kreusch et al, 2013; 2017; Weafer & Fillmore, 2015), with this effect found to be modulated by alcoholrelated sounds (Qureshi et al, 2017) and smells (Monk et al, 2016b). A recent study demonstrates how transient dayto-day variations in inhibitory control present as a risk factor for alcohol consumption (Jones et al, 2018b)

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