A recent study published in Food Quality and Preference explored how recalling a past drinking experience may influence future alcohol consumption desires in women. Researchers found that when female participants remembered a previous episode of alcohol consumption, especially when asked to estimate the calories involved, their motivation to drink again was notably reduced.
Given the wide-ranging health risks associated with excessive drinking, from liver disease to certain cancers, finding simple, practical methods to reduce alcohol consumption is a critical public health goal. Many people continue to drink above recommended limits despite known risks, so researchers aimed to see if memory could play a role in influencing drinking behavior.
Previous research has shown that memory can impact food consumption. For example, studies found that when people were reminded of a past meal, they often ate less in a subsequent meal. Building on this idea, researchers from the University of Portsmouth and Oxford Brookes University wondered if recalling a drinking episode, especially when focusing on the caloric intake, could similarly reduce motivation for alcohol.
“We were interested as excess alcohol consumption increases the risk for a number of diseases and is a substantial burden to health care resources,” said study author Lorenzo D. Stafford, an associate professor in psychobiological psychology at the University of Portsmouth. “The effects of alcohol on memory are well known but less so from the opposite perspective; hence we explored whether memory could be used to reduce alcohol desire. Theoretically this links to similar work in the food domain but had never been examined in alcohol.”
The study included 50 female participants between the ages of 18 and 46, recruited from a university participant pool. Each participant was required to be a regular drinker, consuming between two and 40 UK alcohol units per week, with a low to moderate score on the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) to exclude those with more serious drinking problems.
Participants were divided into two groups: one group received an “Alcohol Cue,” in which they were asked to recall a recent drinking experience and estimate the calories consumed, and the other received a “Neutral Cue,” where they recalled a recent car journey.
Afterward, each participant was given an alcoholic drink—a 275ml vodka-based beverage equivalent to one UK alcohol unit—and asked to consume it at a comfortable pace. The researchers recorded how long it took each participant to finish the drink, using the duration as a measure of their motivation to consume alcohol.
To add further insights, the researchers included assessments of participants’ thirst and fullness to account for factors that might influence drinking motivation. Mood was also recorded using a questionnaire, as it can influence drinking behavior. After drinking, participants were asked to estimate how many additional glasses they would drink if they could only consume the same drink for the rest of the evening. Lastly, participants completed a quiz on alcohol calorie knowledge to gauge their understanding of calorie content in alcoholic beverages.
The study showed that participants who recalled a recent drinking experience took longer to consume the provided alcoholic drink than those who thought about a neutral experience. This finding suggests that memory may indeed reduce motivation to consume alcohol in the short term. Interestingly, though participants in the “Alcohol Cue” group reported a lower estimated prospective intake (the number of additional drinks they would consume), this difference was not statistically significant, indicating that drink duration might be a more sensitive measure of immediate motivation to drink.
The researchers also found that participants with higher scores on the AUDIT scale, indicating a greater risk of alcohol misuse, tended to drink faster and reported a higher desire for more alcohol, regardless of the memory cue. This highlights that individuals at higher risk for alcohol misuse may respond differently to memory cues, potentially needing more targeted interventions.
“The main takeaway message is that the findings here suggest that actively thinking about a previous drinking episode can lead to a reduced desire for alcohol,” Stafford told PsyPost. “However, since the sample was restricted to females, further work is needed to understand whether this also works for males.”
The study, “Recollecting a previous drinking episode reduces subsequent motivation for alcohol in females,” was authored by Lorenzo D. Stafford, Charlie Gould, David Kelly, Matthew O. Parker, Jennifer Seddon, and James Clay.