The assessment of anxiety has progressed well beyond single self-report instruments and is likely to continue to embrace advances in cognitive and affective sciences including both behavioral and neurobiological approaches. So too is there heightened recognition that anxiety does not occur in a vacuum, and that particular environmental contexts must be considered when developing and testing new theories. The few alcohol studies conducted in groups have yielded mixed findings, Social Drinking and Drinking Problem however, likely due in part to methodological limitations (for elaboration see Sayette et al., 2012a). Chief among these concerns, studies have lacked sufficient power to address group-level processes. Moreover, they have arbitrarily varied the size of the groups and failed to determine whether group members were previously acquainted. Other concerns with studies examining alcohol and positive emotion mirror limitations noted by Wilson when critiquing TRT research.

Cultural Perspectives on Social Drinking

As emphasized by Wilson and Marlatt, there remain limitations to exclusive reliance on self-report emotion measures when considering the impact of alcohol in individuals or in groups. Emotional experiences are dynamic and require fine-grained temporal assessment that has been missing from the self-reported instruments typically found in alcohol studies (see Fleming et al., 2013; Levenson, 1987; Sayette et al., 2012a). As noted by Curtin and Lang (2007), there is a need to investigate the effects of alcohol on the various components of emotional responding, including “response threshold, peak intensity, duration, subsequent regulatory processes”) (p. 207). When incorporating social context into the research, the use of a dynamic multimodal approach to emotion assessment is especially warranted. Some of the most intriguing findings in our group formation project stemmed from fairly unobtrusive measures of facial expression, speech, and acoustic patterns (Fairbairn et al., 2015a, 2015b, 2013; Fairbairn & Sayette, 2013; Sayette et al., 2012a).

How many drinks a week is considered occasional drinking or casual drinking?

To wit, many prior studies have neglected to include appropriate beverage control conditions to account for both the potential pharmacological and dosage-set effects of alcohol (for elaboration on dosage-set methods and findings, see Martin & Sayette, 1993). In addition, past studies have tended to rely too heavily on self-report measures of emotion, neglecting comprehensive, multimodal assessments. This model proposes that alcohol creates a myopic focus on the present moment, thereby limiting the degree to which present experiences are influenced by emotions derived from prior experience (Fairbairn & Sayette, 2013). Consistent with the theory, alcohol reduced affective autocorrelation (emotional inertia), and autocorrelation mediated the link between alcohol and self-reported mood, suggesting that alcohol increases the ability to experience the present moment unbound by past experience. Using different methods, Fleming et al. (2013) also found support for this aspect of the attention-allocation model, namely that alcohol enhances the salience of recently appraised information.

Risk Factors of Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD)

• Alcoholism is a chronic disease, and individuals in recovery are at risk of relapse, even after a period of sobriety.
• Today, alcohol continues to function as a popular form of socialization all over the world.
• Exposure to heavy drinking at home while growing up, cultural attitudes towards drinking, stress, and having experienced trauma⁠—all these could make someone more likely to turn to alcohol in a way that becomes unhealthy.
• Yet regardless of whether the outcome is stress relief or enhancement of positive emotion, the laboratory has been reluctant to deliver the confirming data we have expected.

Recent studies also are gaining traction identifying individual difference factors that moderate these emotional effects on alcohol. This work has largely been conducted using social drinkers and presumably offers insight into factors that may lead individuals to begin to develop often benign drinking habits. These person-level differences also may prove useful, however, in developing models to understand who is most likely to transition from a “normal” drinking habit to a drinking problem. As noted by Wilson (1982) and Sher (1987), a major objective of TRT research has been to investigate both the underlying mechanisms mediating alcohol’s effects on emotion and the conditions under which alcohol is reinforcing, including understanding in whom the effects are most pronounced.

Signs of Alcohol Addiction

• Self-reported unfair treatment and racial discrimination has been linked to higher alcohol use among Asian Americans (Chae et al. 2008; Gee et al. 2007; Yoo et al. 2010) and Latinos (Mulia et al. 2008).
• Furthermore, a study on alcohol consumption patterns reveals that younger individuals exposed to alcohol may develop riskier patterns.
• Advances in emotion science also have made an impression on the way in which alcohol researchers conduct their studies (see Curtin & Lang, 2007).
• My husband ended up spearheading an intervention for me that included the rest of my family, none of whom had any idea I had a problem.
• This article reviews a few of the cultural and social influences on alcohol use and places individual alcohol use within the contexts and environments where people live and interact.

Age-Related Patterns in Social Drinking Behaviors

• Alcohol is consumed by 70% of people 18 years and older in the US (SAMHSA, 2018).
• However, this pattern is not uniform worldwide, as gender differences in alcohol consumption have been converging in recent times, particularly in the United States.
• Alcohol use and misuse account for 3.3 million deaths every year, or 6 percent of all deaths worldwide.
• Social alcoholic drinking involves moderate and controlled alcohol consumption during social occasions without severe negative consequences.
• When asked how alcohol problems are treated, people commonly think of 12-step programs or 28-day inpatient rehab but may have difficulty naming other options.
• Human alcohol research that incorporates social context into their designs holds promise for understanding the underlying mechanisms that mediate these effects of alcohol and offers insight regarding individual differences that may moderate alcohol’s effects.

Social and Cultural Contexts of Alcohol Use