A large body of research has provided support for social anxiety’s role in motivating drinking. Social anxiety has been identified as a risk factor for the development of alcohol use disorder in both cases of social anxiety disorder (Buckner et al., 2008) and subclinical presentations (Crum & Pratt, 2001). Furthermore, individuals with comorbid alcohol use and social anxiety disorders report drinking specifically to alleviate tension in social settings at higher rates than those with alcohol use disorder alone (Cooper et al., 2014). Experimental manipulations have also indicated that consuming alcohol, when compared to placebo and control beverages, leads to reductions in stress among socially anxious participants within social stress paradigms (Abrams et al., 2001, Stevens et al., 2017). Consequently, results of both clinical and experimental research suggest it is important to examine the relationship between social anxiety and drinking behaviors in order to better understand how and why these cooccur and may eventually lead to alcohol use disorder.

From a motivational perspective, several prominent theories within the addiction literature provide potential reasons for socially anxious individuals’ decisions to engage in drinking behaviors. For example, the social-attributional model suggests that alcohol reduces fears of social stressors and improves the quality of interpersonal interactions (Fairbairn & Sayette, 2014), social rewards that may be particularly valuable to those who find social situations distressing. More broadly, affective models provide support for alcohol’s role in alleviating negative mood (Bresin and Mekawi, 2021, Cooper et al., 1995), thus potentially rendering drinking appealing for individuals with heightened social anxiety who may be expected to experience negative mood in social environments. Similarly, social drinking has been found to increase experiences of positive mood (Fairbairn et al., 2018), thus providing another affective pathway through which social anxiety may increase drinking as individuals seek amplification of positive moods in social contexts. Furthermore, research investigating situational alcohol consumption among socially anxious individuals has found support for conformity motives, with individuals endorsing drinking in order to fit in with peers who were also drinking (Terlecki & Buckner, 2015). Consequently, when evaluating the extant literature and theory surrounding social anxiety and drinking motives, the value of understanding the role these variables play in shaping problematic drinking behaviors is clear.

Despite plausible affective mechanisms supporting links between social anxiety and drinking, along with established correlations between clinical-level presentations, studies have produced varying findings regarding associations between social anxiety and alcohol consumption (for review, see Morris et al., 2005). Some studies find those lower in social anxiety tend to drink more when seeking relief (Tran et al., 1997), while others have found only mixed support for this idea (Booth & Hasking, 2009), and still others have reported positive relationships between high social anxiety, drinking quantity, and negative alcohol-related consequences (Ham et al., 2016). One aspect of alcohol consumption that may help clarify these equivocal results is the social contexts in which drinking commonly occurs. Historically, studies of social anxiety and alcohol consumption have not simulated the characteristics of authentic social settings in their methods or assessments. Studies that seek to induce social anxiety in a laboratory setting (e.g., Abrams et al., 2001, Stevens et al., 2014, Stevens et al., 2017) often do so by instructing participants to complete tasks that fail to mirror experiences drinkers might encounter in more natural settings (e.g., giving a self-disclosing speech to a panel of judges). Survey-based studies (e.g., Booth and Hasking, 2009, Ham et al., 2016, Tran et al., 1997) carry a similar limitation, as while their measures often target general social anxiety in everyday environments, they are frequently retrospective in approach, meaning that they do not capture socially anxious individuals’ behaviors within their daily lives. Finally, although several experience-sampling studies (e.g., Battista et al., 2015, Goodman et al., 2018) have examined associations between social anxiety and alcohol, such designs have relied on self-reports of alcohol consumption and have often focused on participant-level factors as opposed to interactions between these participant-factors and socio-contextual variables.

Recently, technology has emerged to aid in capturing participants’ real-world experiences and drinking behaviors, thus permitting a fuller integration of contextual factors in the study of real-world drinking. One such technological advancement takes the form of transdermal alcohol sensors, devices which are mounted on a participant’s body and continuously monitor their drinking by tracking the amount of alcohol diffusing through the skin (Barnett et al., 2014). Use of objective transdermal sensors might address a variety of concerns surrounding self-reports of drinking, including concerns regarding potential cognitive demands (e.g. need to convert quantity of alcohol consumed to standardized drinking measures) and measurement reactivity (e.g. drawing attention to drinking behaviors) during ambulatory assessment periods. Notably, these concerns may be amplified for socially anxious participants who may already find social environments to be cognitively resource-intensive (Clark & Wells, 1995). Furthermore, to aid in capturing participants’ social environments, transdermal sensors can be combined with experience-sampling measures in which participants use their personal devices to provide photographs of their surroundings as they go about their daily lives (Christensen et al., 2003, Fairbairn et al., 2018, Goodman et al., 2018). Such a design allows researchers a direct view into participants’ drinking contexts while simultaneously diminishing cognitive demands associated with reporting on social factors and relationships in-vivo via questionnaires.

The present study leverages novel ambulatory technology to explore interactions between person and place in predicting drinking, aiming to elucidate the relationship between social anxiety and alcohol consumption through a consideration of context. Participants completed measures of social anxiety during an initial baseline laboratory visit, then engaged in one week of ambulatory assessment during which they wore a transdermal alcohol sensor and completed experience-sampling measures of social context involving direct image-capture techniques. Consistent with tension-reduction theory (MacAndrew, 1982) and research suggesting that people are motivated to drink to relieve distress (Cooper et al., 2014) and to achieve social rewards (Fairbairn & Sayette, 2014), we predicted a significant interaction between social anxiety and contextual social familiarity in predicting drinking. Specifically, we predicted that participants higher in social anxiety would drink at greater levels in unfamiliar social contexts relative to familiar social contexts, motivated either by a desire to relieve distress or facilitate smoother social interaction. In contrast, we expected the effect of unfamiliar context on drinking would be attenuated among those low in social anxiety.