Alcohol and Social Perception: The Moderating Role of Trait Social Anxiety

This laboratory study aims to examine the moderating role of trait social anxiety (SA) on alcohol’s effects on social perception during an unstructured group formation paradigm. The data will be drawn from a previous alcohol administration study (Sayette et al., 2012) in which groups of three strangers were randomly assigned to an alcohol, placebo, or no-alcohol control beverage condition and were given the opportunity to interact freely with their group members for a 36-minute period. This study will investigate three types of outcome variables: how a participant rates their own sociability following the interaction (social self-perception; SSP), how the other two group members rate the participant’s sociability (social other-perception; SOP), and the discrepancy between these two ratings (self-other discrepancy). To our knowledge, this will be the first laboratory alcohol study that investigates trait SA as a moderator of alcohol’s effects, considers SSP and SOP as primary outcome variables, and does so using an experimental paradigm that better approximates the real-world social situations in which alcohol is most often consumed.