Several factors may limit whether our interpretation can generalize to other samples of alcoholics. Although we attempted to recruit both men and women, we were not successful in identifying a sufficient number of alcoholic women who met our inclusion criteria. Therefore, we only included men in this study and are not able to generalize our results to alcoholic women. A larger sample size may provide the opportunity to identify sources of variance and heterogeneity in alcoholics that could explain differences in response monitoring. Alcoholics in our study compared with alcoholics in other studies (Pfefferbaum et al. 1992; Colrain et al. 2009) were relatively young, had lower amounts of lifetime alcohol consumption, and therefore were not as severely impaired. Also, the range of sobriety in our study was limited. Perhaps with longer sobriety, other compensatory mechanisms may be invoked, as hinted by the negative correlations observed herein between lower CRN and longer sobriety.
