Drinking for negative reinforcement: The semantic priming of alcohol concepts Julia L. Austin, Jane Ellen Smith ⁎ University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA article info abstract Cognitive models of alcohol abuse posit that the context typically associated with alcohol use, such as negative affect, implicitly activates alcohol use cognitions, which in turn leads to alcohol consumption. We selected 40 undergraduate women based upon their alcohol use and reported anxiety sensitivity, and proposed that drinking for the purpose of negative reinforcement would predict increased semantic priming between anxiety and alcohol concepts. A lexical decision task compared the response latencies of alcohol targets preceded by anxiety words to those same targets preceded by neutral words (anxiety–alcohol priming). Level of anxiety sensitivity did not relate to anxiety–alcohol priming, but drinking following social conflict was associated with increased anxiety–alcohol priming. This study specifically suggests that the contextual antecedents to drinking behavior relate to the organization of semantic information about alcohol, and more generally supports cognitive models of substance abuse. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Alcohol abuse Alcohol drinking patterns Semantic priming Anxiety Cues Coping behavior 1. Implicit cognition theory and alcohol use The implicit cognition theory (ICT) of drug urges and drug use behavior assumes that implicit memory associations are central to understanding alcohol use. Based upon neural network or connectionist models of cognition (e.g., Collins & Loftus, 1975), ICT posits that alcohol-related contextual cues are held within automatized action-use schemas (Tiffany, 1990), which develop after multiple pairings between contextual cues and alcohol use. As individuals encounter contextual cues associated with alcohol use, these implicit memory schemas are brought forth to subsequently influence behavior without awareness (Wiers & Stacy, 2006). Thus, ICT argues that cognitions are key to understanding drug use behavior, as cognitions mediate the relationship between affective states and substance use (see review, Birch, Stewart, & Zack, 2006). There has been increased interest in applying ICT and its measurements to alcohol abuse for several reasons. First, evidence suggests that implicit tasks are not as subject to demand characteristics or participant self-presentation bias as are explicit measures (Wiers, Stacy, et al., 2002; Wiers, Woerden, Smulders, & De Jong, 2002). Additionally, implicit measures may show incremental validity over explicit measures in situations in which behavior is more difficult to control, or in which motivation to control that behavior is low (e.g., alcohol abuse or dependence; Fazio & Olson, 2003; Ostafin & Palfai, 2005). 1.1. Means of measuring implicit cognitions Cognitive psychologists have developed specific experimental methods, such as Stroop designs, Implicit Association Tests (IATs), the Extrinsic Affective Priming Task (EAST) and lexical decision tasks to measure implicit cognitions (DeHouwer, 2003). These methods are thought to measure underlying implicit associative memory networks, although there is some speculation that only lexical decision tasks do so directly (e.g., Gawronski & Bodenhause, 2005). Lexical decision tasks utilize a semantic priming paradigm to measure the associative strength between two words. Participants must make a lexical decision (i.e., decide if a word is indeed an English term) for a target word that is preceded by a prime word. The lexical decision response latency is typically Addictive Behaviors 33 (2008) 1572–1580 ⁎ Corresponding author. University of New Mexico, Logan Hall, MSC03 2220, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA. Tel.: +1505 277 2650. E-mail address: janellen@unm.edu (J.E. Smith). 0306-4603/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.addbeh.2008.07.016 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Addictive Behaviors