More Booze Equals More Truth?

Studies say alcohol causes emotional tunnel vision

I’ve been with my boyfriend for nine months. We are both in our late 20s and go out drinking a lot with our friends. I’ve noticed that when he’s drunk, he’ll be super affectionate and say really gushy things about me, our getting married, etc. Are his true feelings coming out, or is he just talking lovey-dovey because of the booze?

— Bridal Hopes

You’ve got to be wondering what it would take for you two to live happily ever after … cirrhosis?

Many people insist that their personality changes dramatically when they’re all likkered up. Remind them of some outrageous thing they did the other night at the bar and they’ll go all protest-y — “But that wasn’t the real me!” — and point the finger at Jack, Jose or the Captain (as in, Daniel, Cuervo, or Morgan). The reality is, research on drinking’s effects on personality by clinical psychologist Rachel Winograd finds that beyond one area of personality — extroverson, which increases slightly in drunken people — we’re all pretty much the same jerks (or whatever) that we are when we’re sober.

This consistency that Winograd and her colleagues observe makes sense vis-a-vis how psychologists find that personality has a strong genetic component and involves habitual patterns of thoughts, feelings and behavior. (There are five major personality dimensions: conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability, openness to experience, and extroversion.) And though the Winograd team did find a small increase in extroversion, a body of research finds that personality traits are largely consistent across time and situations.

However, the skeptic in you might ask: If personality doesn’t change after, say, three Sriracha margaritas, how come we’ve all seen people behaving differently when they’re sauced? Well, according to research by social psychologists Claude M. Steele and Robert A. Josephs, the behavioral changes of drunken excess appear to be caused not by alcohol itself but by alcohol-driven changes in perception that they call “alcohol myopia.” Alcohol appears to restrict attention, giving a person a sort of tunnel vision for whatever’s right in front of them.

To explain this more simply, alcohol basically turns a person into the chimp version of themselves — focusing on whatever’s right in their face and experiencing simple basic emotions in response, like fear, lust, anger, or blubbering affection. Meanwhile, alcohol diminishes their ability for mental processing of any complexity — most notably the sort of thinking that normally leads a person to say, “Well, on the other hand…” (that little voice of reason that pipes up in more sober moments).

Getting back to your boyfriend’s drunken mushygushies, there’s probably some stuff he still needs to figure out. Give it some time — tempting as it is to use the findings about alcohol myopia to answer the question “How will you make him hurry up and propose?” Two words: “open bar.”

(c)2017, Amy Alkon, all rights reserved. Got a problem? Write Amy Alkon, 171 Pier Ave, #280, Santa Monica, CA 90405, or e-mail AdviceAmy@aol.com (advicegoddess.com). Weekly radio show: blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon. Order Amy Alkon’s book, “Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say The F-Word” (St. Martin’s Press, June 3, 2014) at amazon.com.