Emotion regulation has taken on a growing role in the study of psychopathology, both in research as a process, and as a part of a treatment. The interest in emotion regulation has led to an increase in the assessment of this construct, primarily with explicit measures of emotion regulation. However, explicit measures are limited in that they are retrospective, subject to response biases, and impacted by method effects. Further, explicit measures only assess single strategies of emotion regulation at a time. Implicit measures of emotion regulation are not subject to these limitations. One implicit measure of emotion regulation is Etkin’s Emotional Conflict Task, which conceptually follows the Stroop task. The current study utilized the Emotional Conflict Task, but examined psychopathology dimensionally instead of categorically. This allowed for more precise assessment of psychopathology and increased statistical power, without the loss of information inherent to categorical assessment. Until now, the Emotional Conflict Task has only been examined in a few clinical samples, and only with very small sample sizes. This study examined convergent and divergent validity of the Emotional Conflict Task as well as incremental validity over current measures of emotion regulation. Sixty outpatients with anxiety and mood disorders completed the Emotional Conflict Task and a standard battery of questionnaires, along with a semi-structured diagnostic assessment, as part of their intake assessment when presenting for assessment and treatment at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. Convergent validity of the Emotional Conflict Task was assessed by correlating it with two explicit measures of emotion regulation. Next, hierarchical regression was used to examine incremental validity of the Emotional Conflict Task, specifically the amount of variability in functional impairment accounted for, as measured by the Work and Social Adjustment Scale. Finally, this measure was correlated with dimensional measures of psychopathology and temperament to assess the differential relations between these constructs. Results indicated that the Emotional Conflict Task did not correlate with explicit measures of emotion regulation, was not predictive of functional impairment, and was not correlated with dimensional measures of psychopathology or temperament. Potential causes for these null findings and future directions are discussed.

Alcohol is one of the most widely used recreational drugs in the United States today, despite being associated with a myriad of negative effects. Alcohol consumption occurs most frequently within social contexts, and seems to be strongly related to many social factors. It is known that an individual's expectations of the effects of alcohol influences his/her drinking behavior, and that social alcohol expectancies are some of the most frequently reported expectancies. In this study, we explored the relationship between alcohol expectancies and social influences by examining whether exposure to a social context would differentially activate alcohol expectancies. 115 young-adult male participants were exposed to either a social context or a control condition. Subsequently, participants' alcohol expectancies were assessed using both explicit and implicit measurements. Differences between conditions were found on the implicit expectancy measure (a free association task) but not on the explicit expectancy measures. Results from the free association task indicated that participants who were exposed to a social context were more likely to report positive and arousing words in response to the prompt "alcohol makes me _______". These differences suggest that exposure to a social context may not overtly change individuals' alcohol expectancies, but may increase the availability of positive and arousing alcohol expectancies. This increase in availability of positive and arousing expectancies may explain one of the mechanisms involved in deciding to engage in social drinking.