ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Previous work has shown that automatic alcohol-action associations, assessed by the Implicit Association Test (IAT), may play a role in hazardous drinking patterns. The majority of alcohol-related IATs have been constructed using verbal stimuli, and even those who have used pictorial stimuli have only represented beverage categories with pictures. To assess implicit appetitive responses among a broader population of alcohol users, such as those who experience limitations reading and understanding English, there may be utility in the development of an IAT that utilizes only non-verbal stimuli. METHODS: The current study presents an initial effort to develop such a task and examine its association with drinking. One hundred and fifty-three university students participated individually in a laboratory study in which they first completed a pictorial alcohol-specific approach/avoid IAT, followed by self-report measures of drinking. RESULTS: As hypothesized, negative binomial regression analyses showed that IAT scores predicted the number of heavy drinking episodes and typical number of drinks per occasion. LIMITATIONS: The use of a university student sample for this initial study represents an important limitation of this work, which should be addressed in future research. CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide initial evidence for the potential use of non-verbal IATs to assess alcohol-related implicit cognition among adults. Implications for the assessment of hazardous drinking behavior across populations are discussed.
