FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Although discomfort in social situations and drinking are both recognized features of college life, the complex relationship between social anxiety and drinking is not well understood. Research by University of Arkansas psychologist Lindsay Ham into motives for drinking shows that drinking to cope, in particular, can be associated with drinking problems for socially anxious college students.

“It appears that drinking motives, particularly coping motives, have promise of providing a greater understanding of the social anxiety-drinking relationship,” Ham said.

The research, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, could aid in identifying and helping college students at risk for alcohol problems.

“Recent research has shown some counterintuitive results,” Ham said. “Although social anxiety and drinking are closely related in general society, several studies found little or no relationship for college populations.”

Ham and her colleagues from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln studied drinking motives of 239 undergraduate students to clarify the ways social anxiety affected drinking behaviors. They began by administering four established tests, one to identify a student’s level of social anxiety, another to assess drinking motives and two tests to measure quantity and frequency of drinking and drinking-related problems.

The researchers analyzed their data to explore whether drinking motives might operate differently at different levels of social anxiety.

The motives test assessed four basic motives for drinking: social, enhancement, coping and conformity. Social and enhancement motives — drinking to be sociable or to have an exciting time — are considered positive motives. The negative motives are coping — drinking to forget worries — and conformity or drinking due to social pressure.

“In the mid- to high-level social anxiety groups, drinking to cope predicted drinking patterns,” Ham said. “When these students said they were drinking to cope, then there were more drinking problems.”

For those with low social anxiety, enhancement, rather than coping, was related to alcohol use. Conformity motives did not seem to be a major factor.

“We had expected that conformity would be more important, as it had been in a study from Canada,” Ham said. “Perhaps conformity is not so strongly associated with social anxiety for drinking. In our study, the socially anxious who drank for conformity motives weren’t drinking to excess.”

The researchers speculated that some socially anxious individuals might intentionally avoid situations that involved drinking out of concern about social disapproval of their uninhibited behavior while drinking. Perhaps, the researchers suggested, “the inclusion of measures that assess reasons not to drink alcohol in addition to reasons for alcohol consumption may better explain drinking for socially anxious individuals.”

Ham is an assistant professor of psychology in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. Her colleagues for this study were Michel Bonin and Debra A. Hope of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.