Principal Investigator: Noel, Jeffrey
Funder: University of Missouri System-Research Board
Official Title: (In)congruent goals and alcohol approach motivation
The Impact of Situational Goals on College Students’ Motivation to Approach or Avoid Alcohol
This research aims to test the impact on alcohol attitudes of both alcohol-congruent (socializing) and alcohol-incongruent (driving safety) goals, among college students who report recent heavy episodic drinking (HED) versus those reporting no recent HED. Specifically, it seeks to test the effect of situationally-primed social versus safety goals on measures of implicit (fast, automatic) alcohol approach/avoidance versus explicit self-report measures of alcohol-related attitudes and motivation. Drinkers have preferences for and aversions to specific alcoholic beverages, which may confound the results of implicit measures depending on specific alcohol images included in those measures. Thus, an additional aim is to conduct psychometric analysis of implicit approach-avoidance assessments (including an Implicit Association Tests and Approach-Avoidance Tests) that use either standard alcohol images or, via techniques adapted from Lindgren et al. (2012), images that display a participant’s most preferred alcoholic beverages.
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