University Students’ Hangover May Affect Cognitive Research

Murgia, Mauro; Mingolo, Serena; Prpić, Valter; Sors, Fabrizio; Santoro, Ilaria; Bilotta, Eleonora; Agostini, Tiziano · 2020 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.573291

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Summary

This study investigates whether the hangover state of university students constitutes a confounding variable that threatens the internal validity of cognitive research. University students are the primary participants in psychological experiments, yet researchers rarely control for or inquire about alcohol consumption the night before testing. Although prior literature establishes that hangovers impair cognitive functions, the specific impact on experimental data validity had not been addressed. The authors hypothesized that recruiting hungover students could introduce bias, leading researchers to erroneously attribute performance differences to manipulated variables rather than the participants' physiological state. The researchers employed a 2 × 2 mixed-measures design with 36 university students divided into two groups: a "Hangover" group tested the morning after heavy drinking (T0) and a "Non-hangover" group tested after a night of abstinence (T0). Both groups were re-tested one week later in a non-hangover state (T1). Participants completed three cognitive tasks: a parity judgment task, a parity judgment task with a rule-switch component, and an arithmetic verification task. Hangover status was confirmed via the Alcohol Hangover Severity Scale and breathalyzer tests, which showed zero blood alcohol concentration. Additionally, the study surveyed 1,000 students to assess the prevalence of hangovers on campus across different days of the week. The results demonstrated that hangover significantly impaired response times but not accuracy. In all three tasks, the Hangover group performed significantly slower than the Non-hangover group at T0. Furthermore, the Hangover group’s performance improved significantly when re-tested in a non-hangover state at T1, confirming that the slowdown was due to the hangover rather than individual differences. The impairment was consistent across tasks of varying complexity, including those requiring working memory retention and rule inhibition. Survey data revealed that the likelihood of students partying varied by day, with Wednesday nights showing the highest propensity for drinking. Consequently, the prevalence of hungover students on campus was significantly higher on Thursday mornings (13.2%) compared to Tuesday mornings (3.8%). The findings indicate that hangover is a substantial threat to the internal validity of cognitive research involving university students. Because researchers typically do not screen for hangover, they may inadvertently include participants with impaired cognitive processing speeds, potentially skewing results. The study highlights that the risk of this bias is not uniform but depends on the day of the week, with Thursdays posing a higher risk due to preceding weekday partying. The authors conclude that researchers should implement screening protocols to exclude hungover participants or account for this variable to ensure the reliability of cognitive data.

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