Alcohol myopia

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Alcohol myopia is a cognitive-physiological theory on alcohol abuse in which many of alcohol's social and stress-reducing effects, which may underlie its addictive capacity, are explained as a consequence of alcohol's narrowing of perceptual and cognitive functioning. Contrary to the inhibition theory, alcohol myopia posits that rather than disinhibit, alcohol causes users to pay more attention to salient environmental cues and less attention to less salient cues. One study showing a consequence of this that runs contrary to disinhibition theory demonstrated that intoxicated individuals can actually be less likely to engage in risky sexual behavior than their sober counterparts, given appropriate cues.^[1]

It has three central traits:

• Drunken Excess: the tendency for those who drink to behave more excessively.
• Self-Inflation: the tendency to inflate self-evaluations.
• Drunken Relief: the tendency for people who drink to worry less and pay less attention to their worries.

See also

• "Beer goggles"

References

• Linda Brannon and Jess Feist, Health Psychology, An Introduction to Behavior and Health, Sixth Edition, Thomson Wadsworth (2007)

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