(UWIRE) FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. -- Awkward social situations and heavy drinking are familiar features of college life for many students, but research by one University of Arkansas professor has shed new light on the relationship between social anxiety and drinking problems.
Lindsay S. Ham, assistant professor of psychology, collaborated with researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to explore the reasons behind drinking and how they relate to social anxiety.
"My interest is in explaining the relationship between social anxiety and social anxiety disorder with alcoholism and problem alcohol use," Ham said.
Social anxiety disorder, or social phobia, consists of a persistent fear of negative evaluation in social situations, according to the American Psychiatric Association. Individuals with the disorder are twice as likely to develop drinking problems than the general population, though the connection between social anxiety and drinking among college students is not clearly understood.
"There had been limited research in college students," Ham said. "A lot of researchers were assuming that college students were the same as adults who weren't in college, and I guess I'm saying that that's not necessarily true because college is a unique environment."
Findings in previous studies are what prompted Ham and her colleagues to give the issue a closer look.
"When I started looking at college students, I got these funny findings saying that people with social anxiety might even be drinking less," Ham said. "And that was surprising since there is a dangerously high rate when you look at diagnoses of social phobia and alcohol use disorders."
One way to explain this, Ham said, was to look at the reasons and ways a person is drinking, in order to find out why some people with social anxiety drink while others do not.
By examining the reasons or motives behind college students' drinking, Ham and her colleagues concluded that socially anxious individuals who drink to cope or deal with negative feelings and problems develop higher rates of regular alcohol consumption and abuse. Students with higher levels of social anxiety could be at a greater risk to develop alcohol-related problems if their drinking motives involve coping with negative emotion or attempting to reduce anxiety, according to the study, which was published in the "Journal of Anxiety Disorders."
The results were somewhat surprising to the researchers, who had expected conformity to play a bigger role in drinking by socially anxious individuals.
"People who are socially anxious often want to fit in and not stick out and be noticed," Ham said. "So we thought that maybe they would drink more for that reason."
To a certain extent, individuals who drank to conform or fit in did drink more, Ham added, though they weren't developing problems in the same way as those who drank to cope.
"It seems that perhaps the people who are drinking to fit in -- they have a little bit, just to sort of get by that peer pressure," Ham said. "So they're actually ending up drinking in safe ways, even though they're drinking to fit in, which intuitively doesn't sound healthy to people."
Ham and her colleagues used a system of questionnaires to evaluate the drinking habits of 239 undergraduate students, nearly half of whom were in their first year of college.
Participants were asked to rate descriptions of reasons they might drink in a given week as well as the frequency of their drinking.
"It might ask you how often you drink to have a fun time," Ham said. "And you'd give a rating of how often you do that."
Ninety percent of study participants were Caucasian, Ham said, and though she plans to improve on diversity in future research. And while the sample included nearly equal numbers of men and women, the researchers chose not to divide the results based on gender. However, Ham is examining differences in drinking between men and women in another study, she said.
Using the research to identify at-risk individuals could be the next step and it is something Ham has started to pursue, she said.
"We can do things that can at least reduce dangerous drinking and potentially identify people who might be at very high risk for drinking problems," Ham said. "Maybe we could identify those students before it gets to a level that could have negative consequences."
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