Longitudinal relations between cognitive bias and adolescent alcohol use

Introduction: To prospectively predict the development of adolescent alcohol use with alcohol-related cognitive biases, and to predict the development of alcohol-related cognitive biases with aspects of impulsivity.

Methods: Data were used from a two-year, four-wave online sample of 378 Dutch young adolescents (mean age 14.9 years, 64.8% female). With zero-inflated Poisson regression analysis we prospectively predicted weekly alcohol use using baseline cognitive biases. Additionally, multiple regression analyses were used to prospectively predict the emergence of alcohol-specific cognitive biases by baseline impulsivity and alcohol use.

Results: Zero-inflated Poisson analyses demonstrated that the Visual Probe Task reliably predicted weekly alcohol use at different time points. Baseline alcohol use and baseline impulsivity measures did generally not predict alcohol-specific cognitive biases.

Conclusions: The findings of this study indicated that while certain measures of alcohol-related attentional bias predicted later alcohol use in young adolescents, approach biases did not. Baseline measures of impulsivity and alcohol use did not predict later alcohol-related cognitive biases. We discuss implications for cognitive models on the development of cognitive biases and their role in early addictive behaviors.