Seven items (elated, energized, excited, stimulated, talkative, up, vigorous) comprise the stimulant subscale of the BAES, and another seven items (difficulty concentrating, down, heavy head, inactive, sedated, slow thoughts, sluggish) comprise the sedative subscale. The BAES has demonstrated strong psychometric properties, including good internal consistency reliability and a factor structure that supports the distinctness of the stimulant and sedative constructs during both the ascending and descending limbs of the breath alcohol curve (BrAC; Earleywine and Erblich, 1996; Martin et al., 1993; Rueger et al., 2009). This four-factor structure has been shown to be invariant to dose, drinking history, and sex, and has demonstrated robustness to an instructional set that does not disclose the content of the beverage (Rueger et al., 2009).
