The identification-EAST as a valid measure of implicit attitudes toward alcohol-related stimuli

The results of previous studies suggest that the EAST as introduced by De Houwer [(2003). The extrinsic affective Simon task. Experimental Psychology, 50, 77–85] does not perform well as a measure of interindividual differences in attitudes and other assocations in memory. This could be due to the fact that the target concepts in the EAST are task irrelevant and thus might not always be processed. We introduce a variant of the EAST in which participants do need to process the target concepts in order to perform the task. Using this variant, we measured implicit attitudes toward the target concepts beer and sprouts in people who consume many (heavy drinkers) or few (light drinkers) alcoholic drinks per week. As can be expected on the basis of a priori arguments, heavy drinkers had a more positive implicit attitude toward beer than light drinkers whereas both groups did not differ in their implicit attitude toward sprouts. Also, our measure of implicit attitudes was related to self-reported alcohol consumption even after controlling for explicit attitudes.