A short fuse after alcohol: Implicit power associations predict aggressiveness after alcohol consumption in young heavy drinkers with limited executive control

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Abstract

This study tested a hypothesis derived from recent dual-process models, which conceptualize behavior as the interplay of associative and Executive Control (EC) processes. This general logic was applied here to the phenomenon of aggressiveness after drinking alcohol. Specifically, we predicted that automatic associations between alcohol and power would predict aggressiveness after drinking in men with relatively weak EC. Participants were 57 heavy drinking male students, who completed two versions of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), one assessing alcohol-power associations (hypothesized critical associations) and one alcohol-arousal associations (control-test), a classical Stroop test (measure of EC) and a number of alcohol-related questionnaires, including four questions on aggressiveness after drinking (dependent variable). As predicted, automatic alcohol-power associations significantly predicted self-reported aggressiveness after drinking in low but not in high EC individuals. As expected, this interaction was specific for alcohol-power associations since it was not found with regard to alcohol-arousal associations. We argue that this finding, together with a recent related findings, indicates that specific instances of “impulsivity” can be conceptualized as the joint outcome of two processes: a general weak EC and an associative process that predicts the impulsive behavior under study when not inhibited by EC processes.

Introduction

During the past years many dual-process models have been proposed to account for a variety of perplexing psychological phenomena, including common errors in human reasoning and decision making (Evans, 2003, Kahneman, 2003, Strack and Deutsch, 2004). Recently, varieties of these models have been developed to predict the etiology and maintenance of addictive behaviors (Bechara et al., 2006, Deutsch and Strack, 2006, Evans and Coventry, 2006, Stacy et al., 2004, Wiers et al., 2007, Wiers and Stacy, 2006). In these models, addictive behaviors are seen as the joint outcome of two types of processes: a fast, associative, impulsive process, which includes an automatic appraisal of stimuli in terms of their affective and motivational significance and a slower, rule-based, reflective process, which includes processes of deliberation and goal regulation according to expected outcomes (Deutsch and Strack, 2006, Evans and Coventry, 2006, Strack and Deutsch, 2004, Wiers et al., 2007, Wiers et al., in press). Importantly, reflective but not impulsive processing is assumed to heavily depend on Executive Control (EC) functions in order to operate properly. Specifically, EC may be needed for the representation and maintenance of regulatory goals as well as for shielding these goals from impulsive interference. Consequently, under low EC, reflective processing breaks down and impulsive processes “take over”. In line with these theories, recent studies found that implicit alcohol-associations are a better predictor of alcohol use in adolescents with relatively weak EC (Grenard et al., 2008, Houben and Wiers, 2009, Thush et al., 2008). Hence, relatively automatic associations are more important in the prediction of addictive behaviors as the self-regulatory influence of EC wanes. There is also emerging evidence that EC decrease as a long-term consequence of addictive behaviors, especially when this takes place during adolescence (Wiers et al., 2007). This may make the addicted individual even more vulnerable to the influence of impulsive processing on (addictive) behavior. Finally, there is evidence demonstrating that acute alcohol consumption specifically impairs EC but not associative processing (Fillmore and Vogel-Sprott, 2006). This acute alcohol effect can also shift the balance between reflective and impulsive processing: for example, after an acute dose of alcohol, automatic (implicit) attitudes toward sweets predicted sweet-consumption more strongly than when no alcohol was given (Hofmann and Friese, 2008). Again, this effect may be due to an impairment of EC due to alcohol, resulting in a stronger effect of automatic processing on behavior.

The purpose of the present study was to combine the above theorizing on EC as a key moderator of impulsive/reflective processing with the known disinhibiting effects of alcohol on behavior. Specifically, the alcohol-related behavior we focused on in the present study is aggression after drinking alcohol. There is a large literature documenting increased aggression after alcohol, especially in men (Giancola, 2002). From the perspective of dual-process models, this effect may be most likely due to a stronger impact of impulsive processing on behavior. From our dual process perspective, the question then becomes which associative process leads to aggressiveness after alcohol, when not moderated by EC processes. We hypothesized that a particularly relevant impulsive process for aggression under influence of alcohol would be automatically activated associations between alcohol and power. This hypothesis was derived from two sources. First, early research on alcohol expectancies found that expectancies of power and aggression are strongly correlated (e.g., (Brown et al., 1987, Brown et al., 1980), and power motivation and feelings of masculinity were found to increase in men after drinking alcohol (McClelland, 1974). Second, a recent evolutionary account of addiction places self-perceived fitness (“SPFit”) at the core of addiction (Newlin, 2002). According to this SPFit theory, the cortico-mesolimbic dopamine system is a basic motivational system crucial for survival and reproduction, which can be activated by perceived threats to survival and opportunities for reproduction. According to SPFit theory, drugs of abuse artificially inflate feelings of personal power and sexual attractiveness (Newlin, 2002, p. 249). The same activation may also lead to a more aggressive reaction to threats (ibid, p. 433). Note that SPFit-theory predicts that acute effects are enhanced subjective feelings of power and sexual attractiveness, which may not match the impression of objective bystanders (Newlin, 2002). Hence, based on SPFit and earlier work using implicit (McClelland) and explicit (expectancy) measures suggest that alcohol-power associations would be predictive of aggression under influence of alcohol. In order to investigate specificity of this prediction, we also included a measure of implicit alcohol-arousal associations, which we previously found to be predictive of heavy drinking, even after controlling for explicit measures of alcohol expectancies (Wiers et al., 2006, Wiers et al., 2007), but for which we have no reason to expect an association with aggressiveness after alcohol. In summary, we assessed two measures of automatic alcohol-associations, one assessing alcohol-power associations, and one alcohol-arousal associations, and we predict that only alcohol-power associations are related to aggressiveness after drinking alcohol.

In line with our general theorizing (Grenard et al., 2008, Hofmann et al., 2008, Houben and Wiers, 2009, Thush et al., 2008), the influence of alcohol-power associations on behavior is expected to be conditional: we hypothesized that the influence of impulsive processes on actual behavior hinges crucially on whether an individual has sufficient EC at his or her disposal in order to inhibit or override the behavioral implications of the impulse. There is growing evidence that EC may play an important role in the alcohol-aggression relationship (Giancola, 2000, Giancola, 2002, Giancola, 2004). Hence, from our dual-process model, we predict that relatively weak EC will only lead to aggression after alcohol in individuals with strong alcohol-power associations. For instance, a person harboring strong alcohol-power associations may nevertheless refrain from acting aggressively provided he or she is able to recruit sufficient executive control to withhold or regulate the impulse. Similarly, a person with weak EC is not expected to show aggression after drinking alcohol in the absence of strong alcohol-power associations. In summary, we hypothesized that relationship between alcohol-power associations and aggressiveness following alcohol use is moderated by EC, such that it is only found in men with relatively weak EC.

In order to assess alcohol-power and alcohol-arousal associations, we employed two variants of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) (Greenwald et al., 1998). This is a reliable reaction-time (RT) test to assess memory associations, which has been used in alcohol-research to predict alcohol use and problems (De Houwer et al., 2004, Houben and Wiers, 2006, Thush and Wiers, 2007, Wiers et al., 2002). EC were assessed with the well known color-interference Stroop test, a well validated test of EC, and self-regulatory capacity, which activates prefrontal and cingulated cortices (Carter and Van der Veen, 2007, Marsh et al., 2006, McClelland, 1974, Mitchell, 2005). While our first studies on moderation of automatic impulses used measures of individual differences in working memory as index of the moderating influence of EC (Grenard et al., 2008, Hofmann et al., 2008, Thush et al., 2008), in a recent study we found a similar pattern of moderation using the classical Stroop as moderator (Houben and Wiers, 2009).

Section snippets

Participants

Fifty-seven heavy drinking male students from Maastricht University, between 17 and 30 years of age (M = 21.07 years; SD = 2.65), participated in exchange for course credit or a gift certificate. Interested students e-mailed their telephone number and were telephone-screened with a brief interview including their alcohol consumption during each of the past 7 days. Inclusion criteria were male gender, weekly alcohol consumption above the median (15 drinks) for male students in The Netherlands,

Preliminary analyses

The beer-power IAT yielded a significant IAT-effect, t(56) = 7.50, p < .001, indicating that participants were faster when “beer” shared the response key with the “powerful” attribute category than when “beer” was paired with the “weak” attribute category. The beer-arousal IAT yielded an effect in the expected direction which did not reach statistical significance (t(56) = 1.68, p < .10), indicating that participants tended to be faster to categorize beer with active than with passive words.

Results

Discussion

Based on recent dual-process models regarding the interplay between impulsive associative and Executive Control (EC) processes, the present study tested whether automatic associations between alcohol and power predicted aggressiveness after drinking alcohol in men with relatively weak EC as assessed with a classical Stroop test. This hypothesis was confirmed. Further, the moderated prediction was specific: alcohol-arousal associations did not predict aggressiveness after drinking in low EC

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    This research was conducted when the first author was still at the Faculty of Psychology, Maastricht University, The Netherlands. This research was funded by “VIDI” grant 452.02.005 from the Dutch National Science Foundation (N.W.O.) awarded to the first author. The authors wish to thank Tim Schoenmakers and Andrea Wolf for their help with the preparation of this manuscript.

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