For example, Steele and Josephs’ (1990) alcohol-myopia theory posits that alcohol ‘‘restricts attention to the salient, immediate aspects of experience’’ and ‘‘reduces processing capacity so that a greater proportion of this capacity has to bedevoted to the demands of immediate, ongoing activity’’ (p. 929). Consider a man who has a bad workday and returns home to drink. Alcohol may relieve his worry if he is distracted by television, but he may ‘‘cry in his beer’’ if no such distraction is available (Steele & Josephs, 1990). Although alcohol-myopia theory continues to stimulate much research, core elements of the theory remain unresolved. For instance, as noted by Steele and Josephs (1990, footnote 3), it remains unclear which cues will be most salient to a person who is drinking (see also Sayette, 1993). In typical studies, salient distractor cues are explicitly manipulated. For example, intoxicated participants may be asked to prepare a stressful speech, and during this preparation, some of these participants may be given a series of pleasant images to evaluate. Intoxicated participants given no explicit distraction feel at least as anxious as sober participants, presumably because they focus on the upcoming speech, whereas intoxicated participants who are distracted by the images feel less anxious than sober participants (Josephs & Steele, 1990). Yet in many cases, alcohol may be anxiolytic even without explicit distraction (for a review, see Sayette, 1993). Such findings suggest that the association between alcohol and distraction is complex. Environmental distractors can influence the impact of intoxication on emotion and behavior, but in addition, alcohol may affect sensitivity to distraction. That is, even in the absence of explicit distractors, intoxicated participants may in some instances be distracted from stressful thoughts by internally generated cognitions (Steele & Josephs, 1990). Moreover, alcohol may simultaneously increase people’s susceptibility to distraction and undermine their ability to notice that they have become distracted in the first place. The current study addressed this possibility by testing the effect of alcohol on both the occurrence of mind wandering and the capacity to notice that one’s mind has wandered.
References
Sayette, Michael A., Erik D. Reichle, and Jonathan W. Schooler. 2009. “Lost in the sauce: the effects of alcohol on mind wandering.” Psychological Science 20 (6): 747–52. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02351.x.