Social anxiety and alcohol use: The role of alcohol expectancies about social outcomes

Abstract

Though social anxiety disorder and alcohol use disorders commonly co-occur, the mechanisms involved in social anxiety and hazardous drinking among college students are not well understood. The current study contributes to the emerging literature on social anxiety and college drinking as the first known study to test how positive (e.g. “I would feel at ease in social situations”) and negative (e.g. “I would make a fool out of myself”) alcohol outcome expectancies (AOE) specific to social situations (social AOE) impact the association between social anxiety and hazardous alcohol use among 718 undergraduates (61% women; M_age = 19.50, SD = 1.45; 85% White). Results supported the mediation, but not the moderation models. There were positive indirect effects of social anxiety through positive social AOE and negative indirect effects of social anxiety through negative social AOE on both hazardous drinking outcomes (i.e. alcohol consumption and alcohol problems). Findings suggest that there could be competing pathways for increasing (positive social AOE) and decreasing (negative AOE) risk for hazardous alcohol use in socially anxious college students.

• Alcohol
• alcohol outcome expectancies
• college students
• social anxiety

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Notes

¹Though we describe “mediation” in keeping with the terminology of previous studies, it is worth noting that we are more precisely examining indirect effects because of the cross-sectional study design (Maxwell & Cole, 2007).

²Results of the factor analysis are available from the first author upon request.