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Psychopharmacology (2006) 185: 169178
DOI 10.1007/s00213-005-0268-0ORIGINAL INVESTIGATIONJavad Salehi Fadardi . W. Miles CoxAlcohol attentional bias: drinking salience or cognitive
impairment?Received: 20 July 2005 / Accepted: 9 November 2005 / Published online: 21 February 2006
# Springer-Verlag 2006Abstract Objective: 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 cognitivemotivational 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.Keywords Alcohol abuse . Attentional bias . Stroop
paradigm . Executive cognitive functioning . Cognitive
bias . Current concernIntroductionPeople 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 sensoryperceptual
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...