Beer makes the heart grow fonder: single-target implicit attitudes toward beer but not alcohol are related to drinking behaviour in regular beer drinkers

Abstract

Previous studies demonstrated that positive implicit attitudes toward alcohol, assessed with unipolar Implicit Association Tests (IATs), are related to drinking behaviour while negative implicit alcohol attitudes are not. However, because the IAT is a relative measure, the present study aimed at replicating these findings with non-relative unipolar Single Target-IATs (STIATs). Further, participants performed ST-IATs with either alcohol or beer as the target concept. Because we only included regular beer drinkers in this study, it was expected that scores on the beer ST-IAT would be more strongly related to drinking behaviour than scores on the alcohol ST-IAT. Consistent with previous findings, both alcohol and beer ST-IATs supported the coexistence of positive and negative implicit alcohol-related attitudes. Further, correlational analyses showed that positive implicit attitudes toward beer were related to drinking behaviour, while negative implicit attitudes were not. Implicit attitudes toward alcohol, in contrast, were unrelated to drinking behaviour. Hence, these findings suggest that the beer ST-IAT assessed more behaviour-relevant implicit attitudes compared with the alcohol ST-IAT. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed and suggestions for future research are given in the discussion. (Netherlands Journal of Psychology, 65,(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21) Keywords: alcohol; implicit attitudes; Implicit Association TestThe past decade, there has been a surge of interest in implicit attitudes in many areas of psychological research, including research on the aetiology and maintenance of addictive behaviours.

Implicit measures of association in psychopathology research.

“…Note that a single-category variant of the unipolar IAT has also been used (see, e.g., Houben & Wiers, 2008a). The reported internal consistency of the unipolar IAT has ranged rather widely from .29 to .77 (Houben & Wiers, 2009).…”

Individualised but not general alcohol Stroop predicts alcohol use

“…One solution to this may be to use pictorial Stroop tasks wherein the same popular brand can be displayed in different ways. In regards to the broader cognitive bias literature the current results and those of Houben and Wiers (2009) suggest that individualised stimuli in other cognitive bias tasks may be worth pursuing.…”

“…Consistent with this assertion, Fridrici et al (2013) found that non-dependent social drinkers are slowest to colour name alcohol-related words when they are based upon their personal drinking habits compared to non-specific alcohol-related stimuli. Using a different task, Houben and Wiers (2009) found that performance on a single target "beer" implicit association task (IAT), but not a standard alcohol IAT, predicted alcohol consumption in regular beer drinkers. With regard to alcohol-dependent populations, increased attentional bias on individualised Stroop tasks during treatment is associated with relapse (Cox et al, 2002).…”

Reciprocal associations between implicit attitudes and drinking in emerging adulthood

“…Several studies have found that positive implicit attitudes are associated with higher levels of drinking (Houben & Wiers, 2008;Ostafin & Palfai, 2006). In contrast, some studies have reported that implicit alcohol attitudes are not predictive of drinking behaviors (Houben & Wiers, 2009). These contradictory findings may be in part attributable to specific measurement issues of the IAT (Houben & Wiers, 2006a,b).…”