Social anxiety as a moderator of the relationship between perceived norms and drinking.

OBJECTIVE: College students overestimate the drinking of their peers, and the more they overestimate, the more they drink. The present research was designed to evaluate social anxiety as a moderator of the relationship between perceived norms and drinking among college men and women. METHOD: Participants included 1,217 first-year residence-hall students (62.8% women) who completed Web-based assessments of social anxiety, perceived norms, and self-reported drinking. RESULTS: Results replicated previous research in that students overestimated the drinking of their peers (d = 0.75, p < .001). Students who had higher social anxiety drank somewhat more but did not differ from students who had lower social anxiety on perceived norms. However, the relationship between perceived norms and drinking was stronger among students who had higher social anxiety (d = 0.92, p < .001) relative to less socially anxious students (d = 0.02, p = NS). Higher levels of social anxiety were associated with a stronger relationship between perceived norms and drinking for both men (d = 0.86, p < .001) and women (d = 0.50, p < .001) but stronger for men (d = 0.26, p < .001). CONCLUSIONS: These results corroborate previous literature, which suggests that social factors are important determinants of drinking in this population and suggest that social anxiety is associated with susceptibility to peer influences on drinking. Additional work evaluating whether reductions in social anxiety may ameliorate the impact of perceived norms on drinking would be worthwhile.

Structured treatment interruptions: after SMART.

The recent termination of several major studies of structured treatment interruption (STI)--the term for taking a planned break from anti-HIV medications--has drawn heightened attention to this treatment strategy. Always a controversial and intriguing approach, STI has been the focus of large-scale trials only in the last several years. Since January, three such studies have been halted early after researchers found that individuals who stop and start highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) are at greater risk of HIV disease progression and serious illness than those who take treatment continuously. However, other studies show that many questions remain about the risks involved. There is still considerable interest in both the research and HIV positive communities in better understanding the effects of interrupting anti-HIV therapy. This article provides an overview of STI, including some of the recent research findings, and examines several issues that people contemplating a break from treatment should consider.