Published Papers That Used SuperLab

This study evaluated whether alcohol attentional bias is an artifact of excessive drinkers' impaired cognitive functioning, which adversely affects their performance on the classic Stroop test (a measure of inhibitory control) and the Shipley Institute of Living Scale (SILS; a measure of verbal and abstraction ability). Both tests measure aspects of executive cognitive functioning (ECF). Methods: Social drinkers (N=87) and alcoholdependent drinkers (N=47) completed a measure of alcohol consumption, classic and alcohol-related Stroop tests, and the SILS. Results: A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed that the dependent drinkers were poorer on the cognitive measures (SILS scores and classic Stroop interference) and had greater alcohol attentional bias than the social drinkers. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) in which the cognitive measures were controlled showed that the dependent drinkers' greater alcohol attentional bias was not an artifact of their poorer cognitive performance. Conclusion: The results are discussed in terms of cognitive–motivational models, which suggest that excessive drinking sensitizes alcohol abusers' attentional responsiveness to alcohol-related stimuli to a degree that exceeds the adverse effects of alcohol on their general cognitive functioning. Introduction People who abuse alcohol are often unaware of the factors that influence their decisions to drink (McCusker 2001; Wiers et al. 2002), leading some authors to conclude that alcohol abusers have little control over their drinking (Lyvers 2000; Skutle and Berg 1987). Drinkers' automatic reactivity to alcohol stimuli is one of the mechanisms responsible for their lack of control (e.g., Tiffany 1990). It manifests itself as (a) a persistent preoccupation with alcohol (McCusker 2001; Roberts and Koob 1997) and (b) drinking alcohol despite awareness of the negative consequences of doing so (Roberts and Koob 1997). Automatic reactions to stimuli cannot occur independently of a person's attentional system. From the multitude of stimuli impinging on an individual's sensory–perceptual system, attentional mechanisms filter in the most salient stimuli for further cognitive processing (MacLeod and MacDonald 2000). Attentional bias occurs when the attentional channeling is directed toward emotionally valued stimuli despite an individual's efforts to ignore them (Williams et al. 1996). For example, when passing a liquor store, an alcohol abuser might be unable to ignore the