Can Music Affect Decisions-to-Drink? Towards a Dual-Process Model of Risky Decision-Making

Abstract: Party music is an important contextual factor for decisions to partake in risky alcohol consumption, yet few studies have examined its role in this decision-making process. Recent dual-process models of decision-making emphasize the critical influence of context and associations on behavior. In the current study, we exploit the ability of party music to capture social context and alcohol-related associations in order to create a more situated and relevant environment in the lab. We utilize two groups – women with alcohol use disorder (AUD) and women without AUD (controls) – to investigate how specific cues and contexts interact with individualized personal associations and preferences to affect decisions. We report an experiment that suggests that type of music acts selectively to influence the decision-making behavior of people with AUD in an ecological decisions task involving visual alcohol cues and risk information.