Consistently, the subjective assessment of feeling socially isolated was associated with lower alcohol consumption in both summer periods, when most restrictions were lifted. Furthermore, social isolation shows a negative association with alcohol use, with those who feel most socially isolated drinking the least. This finding, at odds with the predictions that isolation during the lockdown would lead individuals to increase their alcohol consumption (Ramalho, 2020), suggests that, in the context of our study, drinking is mainly recreational and related with social events rather than a coping mechanism against loneliness, as previous evidence suggested (Gritsenko et al., 2020, Wardell et al., 2020). These contrasting results may be due to different factors, ranging from study design -previous studies often rely on small sample sizes and cross-sectional designs- and different characteristics of the sample, e.g. in terms of age (Gritsenko et al., 2020, Wardell et al., 2020). It is noteworthy that our sample is mainly composed by older adults, and those who report higher alcohol consumption in our study are mostly medium-educated males in their late fifties.
