To address this issue, our group recently developed a brief version of the BAES (the B-BAES; Rueger et al., 2009) in a sample of 190 social drinkers. The results of the item analysis indicated that 6 of the 14 BAES items showed the strongest associations with the full BAES subscales (Rueger et al., 2009); these include energized, excited, and up for the brief stimulation (B-STIM) subscale, and sedated, slow thoughts, and sluggish for the brief sedation (B-SED) subscale. These new subscale scores showed excellent internal consistency, and very strong correlations with the full BAES scores. Further, confirmatory factor analysis of these six items supported the four-factor structure, i.e., distinct stimulation and sedation factors at ascending and descending BrAC limbs (Newlin and Thomson, 1990), as demonstrated with the full BAES (Earleywine and Erblich, 1996; Rueger et al., 2009). These results were promising in that, after reducing the scale to less than half of the items of the full BAES, there remained robust psychometric properties of the instrument.
