Social anxiety and vulnerability for problematic drinking in college students: the moderating role of post-event processing

Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meetings of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, Philadelphia, PA, November, 2014, and the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, Miami, FL, March, 2015.

Abstract

Socially anxious college students are at increased risk for engaging in problematic drinking (i.e. heavy or risky drinking) behaviors that are associated with the development of an alcohol use disorder. The present study examined whether post-event processing (PEP), repeatedly thinking about and evaluating one’s performance in a past social situation, strengthens the association between social anxiety and vulnerability to problematic drinking among college students. Eighty-three college drinkers with high or low social anxiety participated in a social interaction task and were exposed to a manipulation that either promoted or inhibited PEP about the social interaction. Among participants randomized to the PEP promotion condition, those with high social anxiety exhibited a greater urge to use alcohol after the social interaction and greater motivation to drink to cope with depressive symptoms over the week following the manipulation than did those with low social anxiety. These findings suggest that targeting PEP in college drinking intervention programs may improve the efficacy of such programs for socially anxious students.

Keywords:

• Social anxiety
• alcohol use
• post-event processing
• college drinking

Notes

Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meetings of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, Philadelphia, PA, November, 2014, and the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, Miami, FL, March, 2015.

1. We conducted exploratory analyses of the moderating effect of the PEP manipulation on the association between baseline social anxiety and endorsement of the remaining drinking motives at follow-up (conformity, enhancement, and social motives) to examine the specificity of our findings regarding the coping motives. Indeed, we found a non-significant trend for conformity motives (F[1,74] = 3.70, η² = .05, p = .058) and non-significant results for enhancement (F[1,74] = 2.38, η² = .03, p = .130) and social motives (F[1,74] = 0.00, η² = .00, p = .966) as well. Further information about these analyses is available upon request from the corresponding author.