In addition to shedding light on why alcohol reduces the ERN, the current data more generally are suggestive concerning how alcohol disrupts self-regulatory control over behavior. A number of previous studies have shown that larger ERN amplitude is associated with greater posterror behavioral adjustment (e.g., Gehring et al., 1993; Scheffers, Coles, Bernstein, Gehring, & Donchin, 1996) and increased response control more generally (e.g., Amodio et al., 2004; Amodio, Devine, & Harmon-Jones, 2008). The current data suggest that alcohol disrupts this typical association. To the extent that the ERN represents a distress-related “alarm signal” (see Bush, Luu, & Posner, 2000) indicating a control failure, it appears that alcohol effectively muffles this alarm, thereby limiting the extent to which regulative control can be implemented. In other words, perhaps alcohol impairs regulative control (see Bartholow et al., 2006; Curtin & Fairchild, 2003), at least in part, because the magnitude of the evaluative control signal (reflected in the ERN) is too weak to alert the regulative component that more control is needed. However, the fact that the critical test of the differences in ERN-Control
