Despite its strengths, the current study suffered from two important limitations. First, our central hypothesis concerning alcohol-induced reduction of distress relied solely on a self-reported measure of NA. Ideally, additional measures of negative affect that have been used in previous studies of alcohol’ s effects on distress, such as startle eyeblink magnitude (e.g., Curtin et al., 1998; Donohue et al., 2007) or skin conductance levels (e.g., Sher et al., 2007), should have been included. However, given that prior research has already established that doses of alcohol similar to the one used here are effective in reducing distress as indexed by those other measures, it seems safe to assume that similar effects would have been observed here. A second limitation of the current study is that requiring participants to make overt judgments of the correctness of their responses could interfere with typical error monitoring, potentially limiting effects of alcohol on error awareness. In the future, researchers should consider using a measure such as spontaneous error correction (see Fiehler, Ullsperger, & von Cramon, 2005; Rodríguez-Fornells, Kurzbuch, & Münte, 2002) to avoid this potential problem.
