Consistent with previous work, ALDH2*2 predicted lower rates of alcohol use in these analyses. In contrast, associations of COMT with drinking outcomes were limited to a non-significant trend for Met carriers to report more drinks per week. Additionally, neither COMT nor ALDH2 showed direct associations with implicit drinking motives. These findings suggest that future studies should examine moderating as well as direct genetic associations in the context of implicit cognitions. The present findings also suggested significant (albeit inconsistent) associations of implicit motives with drinking outcomes, suggesting that implicit measures of two commonly studied drinking motives (i.e., coping and enhancement motives) could be useful for predicting drinking behavior. Although implicit measures of alcohol cognitions are sometimes found to predict alcohol use only among heavy drinkers (reviewed in Field, 2006; Wiers et al., 2007), the current results suggest that these measures could be sensitive to variation in drinking behavior in samples with relatively moderate drinking rates.
