Introduction to the Special Issue on Alcohol and Cognition in Interpersonal Violence

Alcohol use is strongly implicated in interpersonal violence, including sexual assault, yet research on this topic has often developed in separate literatures. Work in this area has typically focused on perpetration risk, memory and reporting, or legal and professional response, rather than considering how these problems may be linked through common cognitive processes. This special issue brings these strands of work into closer dialog by positioning alcohol-related interpersonal violence as a social-cognitive problem. The articles in this issue show that alcohol affects cognitive processes that are central to both the occurrence of violence and the responses that follow it. Taken together, the contributions suggest that alcohol-related interpersonal violence is not simply a matter of intoxication increasing risk, but of alcohol shaping the cognitive processes through which violence is enacted, remembered, evaluated, and addressed.