Sociability Alcohol Expectancies Shape Predictions of Drinking Behavior and Anxiety in a Novel Affective Forecasting Task

Abstract

Background: Existing work proposes that people with higher social anxiety symptoms and sociability alcohol expectancies believe alcohol can lower their anxiety. However, studies have primarily analyzed retrospective reports, not anticipatory motives. Since predictions of future emotion (i.e., affective forecasts) strongly influence behavior, it is critical to understand how people predict alcohol will influence their anxiety. Additionally, intolerance of uncertainty (IU) is related to the use of alcohol as a coping tool, but there is a dearth of work testing whether IU influences alcohol-related forecasts. Objectives: Utilizing a novel affective forecasting task, we tested the prediction that social anxiety symptoms, sociability alcohol expectancies, and IU would relate to predictions about alcohol use. In an initial study and preregistered replication, participants imagined themselves in stressful social scenarios and forecasted how anxious they would feel when drinking and when sober. In the replication, participants also forecasted whether they would drink in the imagined scenarios. Results: Contrary to hypotheses, social anxiety symptoms and IU did not significantly predict higher forecasted anxiety across studies, nor did they predict forecasted drinking. Exploratory analyses showed that participants with higher sociability alcohol expectancies forecasted being more likely to drink, and forecasted feeling less anxious when drinking (versus being sober). Even after statistically controlling for social anxiety, the effect of sociability expectancies remained significant in predicting forecasted anxiety and forecasted drinking. Conclusions: Clinicians could consider specifically targeting sociability expectancies for alcohol use difficulties, and future research should continue utilizing affective forecasting paradigms to test links between social anxiety, alcohol expectancies, and alcohol-use problems.

Keywords:

• Affective forecasting
• social anxiety
• sociability alcohol expectancies
• intolerance of uncertainty

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

For both studies, all survey materials, data, and analysis code are available at https://osf.io/pskg7. Study 2 was preregistered following data collection but prior to any analyses being conducted and can be found at https://osf.io/ucxzs.

Notes

1 Careless responding was defined as failing more than two of three catch items as well as a comprehension check. Catch items were distributed throughout the self-report measures and required participants to select a specific answer choice (e.g., “Please click ‘slightly agree’ for this item”). The comprehension check was administered after participants read survey instructions and consisted of a multiple-choice question about the survey instructions.

2 In the full sample without exclusions for careless responding, the effect of social anxiety symptoms narrowly obtained significance in predicting forecasted drinking (b = 0.02, 95% CI [0.001, 0.04], z(265) = 1.90, p = .04).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.