Abstract
Although some studies have demonstrated that the indirectly measured attitude towards alcohol is related to alcohol use, this relationship has not always been confirmed. In the current study, we attempted to shed light on this issue by investigating whether the predictive validity of an indirect attitude measure is dependent upon attitude accessibility. In a sample of 88 students, the picture-picture naming task, an adaptation of the affective priming paradigm, was used to measure the automatically activated attitude towards beer. Attitude accessibility was measured using a speeded evaluative categorization task. Behavioral measures were the amount of beer poured and drunk during a bogus taste test and the choice between a bottle of beer or water at the end of the experiment. In line with our hypothesis, the indirectly measured attitude towards beer predicted behavior during the taste test only when it was highly accessible. In contrast, this attitude was related to choice behavior irrespective of attitude accessibility. This study confirms that indirect attitude measures can be valuable predictors of alcohol-related behavior, but that it is sometimes necessary to take attitude accessibility into account.
Highlights
Alcohol use can lead to a host of negative outcomes, which is most clearly seen in phenomena such as addiction and binge drinking
Data Reduction Four participants were excluded from the analyses: one participant because of an unusually large amount of errors (50%) during the semantic categorization task, one participant because of an experimenter error during the administration of the taste test, and two participants because we were not able to accurately register a response on more than 25% of the picture-picture naming task (PPNT) trials
The accessibility of the attitude towards beer was calculated by subtracting the mean reaction time of semantic categorization of beer stimuli from the mean reaction time of evaluative categorization of beer stimuli
Summary
Alcohol use can lead to a host of negative outcomes, which is most clearly seen in phenomena such as addiction and binge drinking. It is important to study the psychological factors that are related to alcohol use This knowledge will increase our understanding of the processes at play in alcohol abuse and addiction and will eventually lead to the development of prevention and treatment strategies. The predictive validity of these direct attitude measures can be limited by a lack of introspective capacity [1] and measurement artifacts such as impression management and demand characteristics [2,3] This is not the case for more recently developed indirect attitude measures, which do not rely on self-report. Consider the APT, which is used in the present study This task requires participants to respond as quickly as possible to positive and negative target stimuli (e.g., to categorize these targets as positive or negative). The APT can be used as a measure of participants’ automatically activated attitudes towards the prime stimuli (e.g., [10])
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