Social anxiety, disengagement coping, and alcohol-use behaviors among adolescents.

Background And Objectives: Although research indicates that social anxiety (SA) is associated with problematic drinking, few studies have examined these relations among adolescents, and all alcohol-related assessments have been retrospective. Socially anxious youth may be at risk to drink in an effort to manage negative affectivity, and a proclivity toward disengagement coping (e.g.

Effects of ostracism and sex on alcohol consumption in a clinical laboratory setting.

Drinking to cope with negative affect is a drinking pattern that leads to problematic alcohol use both in college and after graduation. Despite theory and correlational evidence to this effect, establishing a link between stress and alcohol consumption among college students in the laboratory has yielded both a limited number of studies and, at times, inconsistent results. The present study attempts to resolve these issues through investigating the effects of an ecologically relevant stressor-ostracism-on alcohol consumption in a clinical laboratory setting.

Stress Reactivity, Social Anxiety, and Alcohol Consumption in People With Alcoholism: A Laboratory Study.

Objective: Social anxiety may maintain alcohol dependence through increased reactivity to stressful events, a propensity to drink to cope with stressful events, or both. The current study is a secondary analysis of an existing dataset that examined differences between individuals with alcohol dependence and concurrent high and low social anxiety in objective and subjective stress reactivity to a laboratory stressor (Trier Social Stress Test; TSST), as well as consumption of alcohol following the stressor.

Methods: Forty participants with alcohol dependence (20 women) were randomly assigned to the TSST condition as part of the parent study.

An acute psychosocial stressor increases drinking in non-treatment-seeking alcoholics.

Rationale: Although studies suggest that stress is an important reason for relapse in alcoholics, few controlled studies have been conducted to examine this assumption. Evidence of stress-potentiated drinking would substantiate this clinical observation and would contribute to the development of a model that would be valuable to alcohol treatment research.

Objectives: The hypothesis was tested that an acute psychosocial stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), increases alcohol consumption in non-treatment-seeking alcoholics.

Phenomenological Characteristics of Attentional Biases Towards Threat: A Critical Review.

Although research has consistently revealed the presence of a general attentional bias towards threat, empirical and theoretical ambiguity exists in determining whether attentional biases are comprised of facilitated attention to threat, difficulty in disengagement from threat, or both, as well as whether attentional biases reflect automatic or strategic processes. This paper reviews empirical investigations across 4 common assessment tasks: the Stroop (masked and unmasked), dot probe, visual search, and the Posner tasks. Although the review finds inconsistencies both within and between assessment tasks, the evidence suggests that attentional biases towards threat are comprised of each of the phenomenological characteristics addressed in this paper.

The moderating role of health fear on the relation between smoking status and panic symptoms among adolescents.

The present study examined the moderating role of health fear on the concurrent relation between smoking status and panic attack symptoms among 249 adolescents (132 females, M(age)=14.86 years). As hypothesized, youth high in health fear reported elevations in panic attack symptoms, whereas this relation was relatively weak among those low in health fear.