The roles of alcohol and alcohol expectancy in the dampening of responses to hyperventilation among high anxiety sensitive young adults.

Previous research suggests that high anxiety sensitivity (AS) young adults are particularly sensitive to alcohol's dampening effects on their responses to arousal-induction challenge. This sensitivity to alcohol reward may place high AS individuals at increased risk for alcohol abuse. Over-and-above alcohol's pharmacological effects, tension-reduction expectancies might contribute to alcohol's reactivity-dampening effects in high-AS individuals. The present study examined the role of alcohol and alcohol expectancy factors by activating expectancies experimentally. Forty-eight high-AS young adults were randomly assigned to one of 3 beverage conditions: alcohol, placebo, and control. Following beverage consumption and absorption, participants underwent a 3-min voluntary hyperventilation challenge. Replicating and extending previous findings, participants in the alcohol condition showed dampened affective and somatic responses to the challenge, and marginally dampened cognitive responses to the challenge, compared to both placebo and control participants. However, placebo participants did not display dampened responses to the challenge relative to control beverage condition participants. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)