Drinking your troubles away. II: An attention-allocation model of alcohol's effect on psychological stress.

Abstract

Two experiments examined an attention-allocation model of alcohol's effect on psychological stress (Steele, Southwick, & Pagano, 1986). On the basis of this model, it was hypothesized that alcohol's impairment of information processing, coupled with the demands of distracting activity, would reduce anxiety over an upcoming stressful event by making it harder to allocate attention to thoughts about the event. Alcohol intoxication without a distracting activity was not expected to have an anxiety-reducing effect but possibly to increase anxiety by narrowing and constraining attention to the imminent stressor. Finally, the distracting activity in this experiment, without intoxication, was not expected to reduce anxiety. The present experiments tested this reasoning by crossing whether or not subjects had received alcohol (dose of 1 ml/kg) with whether they rated art slides or did nothing during the period prior to an expected stressful speech. As predicted, being intoxicated and rating slides reduced subjects' anxiety over the speech significantly more than any other condition in both experiments; being intoxicated and doing nothing significantly increased subjects' anxiety compared with the other conditions, but only when the data from both experiments were combined. Activity alone bad no anxiety-reducing effect. These results are discussed as (a) supporting the role of cognitive impairment and attention allocation in mediating alcohol's anxiety-reducing effects, (b) clarifying conditions under which alcohol can increase anxiety, and (c) demonstrating the importance of activity in mediating the variability of alcohol's tension-reducing effects. It is not a sudden feeling. It slips up on you. The host hands you the glass. Your tongue, mouth, and throat experience a familiar flavor, a strong, attention-grabbing flavor, one that seems capable of altering your chemistry. You move on, sipping this flavor, talking to friends, acquaintances. Shortly, your immediate experience begins to take on a certain intensity. The present seems to move to the foreground of awareness. Thoughts about the past, the future, problems, and anxieties recede in awareness. They become more difficult to retrieve and hang onto. It is the presentmthe conversations, the salient events and thoughts--that reigns over awareness. The sipping continues, as if to further intensify the present, to further draw out its distinction from the rest of experience, to leave the rest behind. Like being on a raft that has shoved off from the bank, there is a lifting feeling of having broken away. Nearly everyone has experienced effects like these from drinking alcohol--a forgetting of worries, a relief from anxiety over upcoming events, intensified positive mood, and so on. It is thus easy to imagine that these effects of alcohol constitute