News — Self-consciousness plays a role in a young adult’s tendency to binge drink, but that role evolves over time. A new study published in Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research found that people who are self-conscious may be more likely to binge drink as young adults but less likely to binge drink as they mature. The findings may help facilitate early identification and interventions for certain young adults who may be at risk for problem drinking.
The study is the first to examine the relationship between social-attentional focus and problem drinking using an objective measure in a real-world context. Participants aged 21 to 30 were invited to a laboratory where they engaged in unscripted conversations with another participant. While in separate rooms, participants engaged in video calls where their own and conversation partners’ images were displayed side by side on the monitor. Each participant had two conversations, either with a friend or with a stranger. Researchers tracked participants’ eye movements during the conversation and compared how much time they spent looking at themselves and how much time they spent looking at their conversation partner as a measure of social attention and self-consciousness. At the outset of the study and one and two years after the beginning of the study, participants completed questionnaires about their drinking behavior and occurrences of negative experiences related to alcohol in the prior thirty days.
The researchers found that the more self-focused a participant was during the video calls, the more binge drinking days they tended to have reported at the outset of the study. Specifically, for each percentage point increase in time participants spent looking at themselves on the screen, there was a 1.3 percent increase in binge drinking days at the outset of the study. And for every one percent increase in time spent looking at the other person on the screen, there was a 1.1 percent decrease in binge drinking days at baseline.
However, over time, those who were more self-focused in their video calls showed greater declines in binge drinking days. The young adults who looked at themselves more often during their conversations with their friend showed a considerable decrease in binge drinking days—more than a 50 percent reduction each year. The average reduction for all participants was less than 40 percent each year, a typically observed trajectory for this age group. The researchers speculate that people who are self-conscious may be more sensitive to social norms and expectations and, therefore, drink more in their late teens and early twenties when heavy drinking may be more typical and drink less as they get older and norms around drinking change. They note that it is unclear whether self-consciousness may drive binge drinking, for example, as a coping strategy, or whether it may be a consequence of binge drinking, as heavy drinking can lead to depression and anxiety, which is associated with self-consciousness.
The study’s findings may not be applicable to those with alcohol use disorder, who were excluded from the study. Researchers recommend future studies on different age groups and lengthening the duration of the longitudinal follow-up to better understand the role of social attention in drinking behavior.
Examining social attention as a predictor of problem drinking behavior: A longitudinal study using eye-tracking. J. Han, C. Fairbairn, W. Venerable, S. Brown-Schmidt, T. Ariss
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