• heavy drinking days [ Time Frame: pre-treatment, 1-month follow-up and 4-month follow-up ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]
  
• total alcohol consumption [ Time Frame: pre-treatment, 1-month follow-up and 4-month follow-up ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]
  
• drinking-related negative consequences [ Time Frame: pre-treatment, 1-month follow-up and 4-month follow-up ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]
  
• social (interactional) anxiety [ Time Frame: pre-treatment, 1-month follow-up and 4-month follow-up ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]
  

• alcohol expectancies of social evaluative situations [ Time Frame: pre-treatment, 1-month follow-up and 4-month follow-up ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]
  
• drink refusal self-efficacy in social situations [ Time Frame: pre-treatment, 1-month follow-up and 4-month follow-up ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]
  

Episodic alcohol abuse is common among college students. Recently, brief interventions focusing on motivational strategies and behavior skills to reduce heavy drinking and alcohol-related problems have shown beneficial small to medium effects in college drinkers who reported heavy drinking and/or alcohol-related problems. Most interventions have not taken into account psychiatric comorbidity, in particular social anxiety, a frequent problem for college students that has been linked to excessive alcohol use. This project will extend knowledge on brief interventions by integrating cognitive-behavioral therapeutic strategies for social anxiety with an existing alcohol intervention designed for college students.

The efficacy of a new integrated treatment, the Brief Intervention for Socially Anxious Drinkers (BISAD) was developed and tested. All participants reported heavy alcohol use, alcohol-related problems and social anxiety based on standardized measures. Phase I of the study focused on the development of the treatment manuals and measures of therapy integrity for BISAD and an alcohol-focused intervention, a modified treatment-as-usual at the local university. During this phase therapists were trained to administer the manualized interventions to study participants (N=12). Phase II included further refinement of the therapy integrity measures and data collection for the pilot study (N=41). Participants were randomized to either BISAD (n=21) or a modified treatment-as-usual (n=20) condition. The pilot study provide preliminary data on the efficacy of the proposed intervention in reducing heavy drinking, social anxiety, and their negative consequences at 1-month and 4-month follow-ups after treatment termination. These data provide estimated effect sizes for future testing of BISAD in a full-scale clinical trial. Furthermore, the study results contribute to the conceptualization and methodological development of combined interventions for other substance use and psychiatric problems.