Operant responding for alcohol following alcohol cue exposure in social drinkers

•Motivation to drink after cue exposure was measured with an operant response task.•Social drinkers drank in accordance with their typical drinking habits.•Alcohol cues may not lead to excessive consumption in non-dependent drinkers.

IntroductionCue reactivity paradigms have found that alcohol-related cues increase alcohol consumption in heavy drinkers and alcoholics. However, evidence of this relationship among non-alcohol dependent “social” drinkers is mixed, suggesting that individual differences must be considered when examining cue-induced drinking behavior. One important individual difference factor that might contribute to cue-induced drinking in the laboratory is the amount of alcohol that participants typically drink during occasions outside the laboratory. That is, those who typically consume more alcohol per occasion could display greater cue-induced drinking than those who typically drink less. The present study examined this hypothesis in healthy, non-dependent beer drinkers.MethodsThe drinkers were exposed to either a series of beer images intended to prime their motivation to drink beer or to a series of non-alcoholic images of food items that served as a control condition. Following cue exposure, motivation to drink was measured by giving participants an opportunity to work for glasses of beer by performing an operant response task.ResultsResults indicated that drinkers exposed to alcohol cues displayed greater operant responding for alcohol and earned more drinks compared with those exposed to non-alcohol (i.e., food) cues. Moreover, individual differences in drinking habits predicted subjects' responding for alcohol following exposure to the alcohol cues, but not following exposure to food cues.ConclusionsThe findings suggest that cue-induced drinking in non-dependent drinkers likely results in consumption levels commensurate with their typical consumption outside the laboratory, but not excessive consumption that is sometimes observed in alcohol-dependent samples.