ORIGINAL ARTICLE Drinking and Thinking: Alcohol Effects on Post-event Processing in Socially Anxious Individuals Susan R. Battista • Alissa H. Pencer • Sherry H. Stewart Published online: 25 July 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract We examined the effects of drinking alcohol at the time of a social event on later post-event processing among socially anxious individuals. A sample of 84 (43 males, M age = 21.36 years, SD age = 2.06) undergraduates were randomly assigned to an alcohol (n = 44; mean blood alcohol concentration = .057 %), or a no alcohol (n = 40) condition. Following beverage consumption and absorp- tion, they participated in a social interaction with an opposite-gendered confederate. Four days later, partici- pants completed a measure of post-event processing of this interaction. A significant beverage condition by gender interaction was observed on levels of post-event process- ing: post-event processing levels were lower in the alcohol versus the no alcohol condition for females, whereas they were higher in the alcohol versus the no alcohol condition for males. This pattern of alcohol reinforcement might help explain observed gender differences in the odds of alcohol use disorders in social anxiety disorder. Keywords Social anxiety Á Post-event processing Á Rumination Á Alcohol Introduction A positive association between social anxiety and alcohol use disorders has been well-established in clinical popu- lations (e.g., Grant et al. 2005; Schneier et al. 2010). For example, in a large sample of adults, the lifetime preva- lence of co-occurring social anxiety disorder and an alco- hol use disorder was 2.4 % (Schneier et al. 2010). Further, in 79.7 % of those cases, social anxiety disorder preceded the onset of the alcohol use disorder (Schneier et al. 2010). Recently, an investigation by Xu et al. (2012) examined gender differences in the course of social anxiety disorder. They found that, as in the general population, men were more likely than women to meet criteria for alcohol abuse overall, regardless of whether or not they had social anx- iety disorder. However, women with social anxiety disor- der were especially likely to develop comorbid alcohol abuse compared to women without social anxiety disorder (17.5 vs. 11.2 %, respectively). The respective rates of alcohol abuse in men with and without social anxiety dis- order were 25.9 and 24.6 %, respectively. Similar gender differences have been found using a prospective research design where the presence of social anxiety disorder at baseline predicted the development of an alcohol use dis- order approximately three years later in women, but not in men (Buckner and Turner 2009). Given these findings, it may be that women share a common vulnerability (e.g., neuroticism, anxiety sensitiv- ity) for both social anxiety and alcohol problems. However, based on findings indicating that social anxiety disorder typically precedes alcohol use disorder (Buckner and Turner 2009; Schneier et al. 2010), it is also possible that alcohol use is negatively reinforced in individuals with social anxiety by reducing their levels of state social anx- iety and that this effect may be stronger in females. For S. R. Battista Á A. H. Pencer Á S. H. Stewart (&) Department of Psychology, Life Sciences Centre, Dalhousie University, P.O.Box 15000, Halifax, NS B3H 4R2, Canada e-mail: sstewart@dal.ca A. H. Pencer IWK Health Centre, Halifax, NS, Canada A. H. Pencer Á S. H. Stewart Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada 123 Cogn Ther Res (2014) 38:33–42 DOI 10.1007/s10608-013-9574-8