4. Discussion
The present study tested the relationship between drinking
motives and alcohol-related IBs by employing a new alcohol
Encoding Recognition Task (ERT). The main results are as follows.
Correlations revealed that individuals who more often interpreted
ambiguous negative affect situations as alcohol-related, drank
more often in response to negative and positive emotions,had
consumed more alcohol during the past week, showed higher
levels of hazardous drinking, and drank more during the week
following the lab session. Similarly, individuals who more often
interpreted ambiguous positive affect situations as alcohol-related,
more often drank in response to positive emotions, had consumed
more alcohol during the past week, showed higher levels of hazardous
drinking, and drank more during the week following the lab
session. Importantly, scores on control sentences in both negative
and positive affect situations did not correlate with any of the
alcohol-related self-report measures. Regarding the regression
analyses testing the valence-specific association between drinking
motives and alcohol-related IBs, the following results were obtained:
As predicted, DMQ-R coping motives (but not enhancement
motives) were a unique predictor of the tendency to interpret
negative ambiguous alcohol-relevant situations in an alcoholrelated
manner. Importantly, the predictive validity of coping