Individual differences in the stress-response-dampening effect on alcohol: a dose-response study.

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that alcohol consumption can lead to attenuated stress response, but parameters such as dose and personality traits appear to influence the magnitude of alcohol's effects. To better characterize these relations, male social drinkers were asigned to either a placebo, a moderate, or a high dose of alcohol and then had heart rate and a self-report measure of anxiety taken during a stressful social interaction. Consistent with previous research, alcohol dampened both heart rate and, to a lesser extent, anxiety responses to the stressor. Because the reduced heart rate responsivity was obtained in the absence of increased basal heart rate, cardiovascular stress response dampening (SRD) does not appear to be an artifact of an initial values effect. Although there was some evidence that individuals with prealcoholic personality traits were especially sensitive to the SRD effect of alcohol, this effect did not appear to be strong or robust across alternative measures of prealcoholic traits. There was no evidence that self-consciousness or expectancies for tension-reducing alcohol effects were associated with stress responsivity in subjects consuming alcohol. Alcohol is generally considered to be effective in reducing psychological stress. However, despite much empirical investigation, the effect of alcohol on stress is neither well characterized nor well understood (Pihl & Smith, 1983). A number of both correlational and experimental studies indicate that alcohol can reduce stress and is consumed for its stress-reducing properties (predictions generated from the tension reduction hypothesis; Pihl & Smith, 1983), but other studies yield results that contradict these findings. Although the general literature on alcohol and stress appears quite muddled, scrutiny of the literature reveals several areas of consistency (Sher, in press). One of these areas of consistency concerns the attenuating effect of a relatively large (i.e., around 1 g ethanol/kg body weight) dose of ethanol on the cardiovascular responses to a discrete stressor (Cummings & Marlatt, 1983; Levenson, Sher, Grossman, Newman, & Newlin, 1980; Sher & Levenson, 1982; Wilson, Abrams, & Lipscomb, 1980; Zeichner, Feuerstein, Swartzman, & Reznick, 1983'). Although the breadth and extent of this stressresponse-dampening (SRD) effect of alcohol is currently uncertain, each of these recent studies has convincingly demonstrated significant dampening of the heart response to a discrete stressor manipulation. These findings are important in that they suggest that alcohol may be especially tension reducing (and consequently