Participants will be asked to think of a specific example of the most (or one of the most) negative, unpleasant event with alcohol they have experienced; the event they choose must have occurred at least a year ago. Or they will be asked to think of the most significant event that has occurred in the past year. After thinking of a specific event, they will be given three minutes to write about their experience. The writing prompt will ask that they express the event information in a few sentences. This writing prompt will help participants place themselves back into that moment and access salient emotions and cognition about it. Similar negative event prompts have been used in counterfactual thinking studies (McFarland & Alvaro, 2000; White & Lehman, 2005).

Participants in this group, the event plus the factual thinking task condition, will be told the following after completing the negative event writing task, "After disappointing and/or negative experiences like the one you described on the previous page, people often think about the details of the situation. For example, when it happened, who was involved, and what happened right before or after the incident occurred. In the space below please provide examples of some of these details.." There will be 10 blank boxes below the instructions and participants will be asked to provide some examples of details from their traumatic event. They will be asked to only list as many as they can naturally recall without repeating any. This procedure is derived from Kray and colleague's (2010) study on counterfactual thinking and meaning in life.

Participants will be told after completing the negative event writing task, "After disappointing and/or negative experiences like the one you described, people sometimes cannot help thinking "what if…" or "if only…" and imagining how things might have gone differently. That is, if only I had done something differently, the negative drinking situation could have been avoided or turned out better. In the box below please identify things that, had they been different, would have improved the outcome of the negative drinking situation you described earlier and briefly describe how the outcome would have been better." Participants will be asked to list three counterfactuals about the event. Participants will also be asked to think of situations where these strategies could be used, to list out any obstacles that might prevent them from implementing these strategies and to indicate their intention to use each strategy over the next week.

Participants will complete a counterfactual based intervention where they come up with three if only..then statements about how a past drinking behavior could have been altered to be better and to think about protective behavioral strategies that they could use in a future similar situation to make the outcome better.

The Protective Behavioral Strategy-20 measure is a 20-item questionnaire assessing the use of three types of Protective Behavioral Strategies: serious harm reduction (8 items), stopping/limiting drinking (7 items), and manner of drinking (5 items). Each item has response options consisting of 1 (Never), 2 (Rarely), 3 (Occasionally), 4 (Sometimes), 5 (Usually), 6 (Always); there is also a Do not wish to respond option. Protective Behavioral Strategy Use scores are average scores for each subscale, with minimum scores of 0 and maximum scores of 6. Higher scores indicate greater use of protective behavioral strategies.

The Young Adult Alcohol Consequences Questionnaire is a 48-item questionnaire assessing problems from alcohol consumption within the last three months. Each item is categorized into one of eight problem domains: social/interpersonal, academic/occupational, risky behavior, impaired control, poor self-care, diminished self-perception, blackout drinking, and physiological dependence. For each item, participants select Yes, No, or Do not wish to respond to indicate whether they have experienced each problem from alcohol consumption (e.g., "I have become very rude, obnoxious or insulting after drinking"). If a participant selects Yes that is indicative of the participant having experienced that specific consequence from alcohol consumption.

To assess an individual's contemplation to change their alcohol drinking behavior, a Contemplation to Change Ladder (Biener & Abrams, 1991) will be used. This ladder displays response options on a ladder graphic, with rungs starting at 0 and ending at 10; each rung increases by one point value as you go up the ladder. Anchors with text descriptions are located at points 0 (No thought of quitting), 2 (Think I need to consider quitting someday), 5 (Think I should quit but not quite ready), 8 (Starting to think about how to change my drinking patterns), and 10 (Taking action to quit e.g., cutting down, enrolling in a program). The higher a participant selects a rung on the ladder, the higher the contemplation to change their alcohol drinking behavior.

The Perceived Behavioral Control questionnaire measure is made up of six items. Three items assess the individual's ability to avoid alcohol if they wanted to and three items assess binge-drinking or the ability to drink less than 7(females) or 10 (males) units in a single session in the next week. Each item is scored on separate 7-point bipolar adjective scales (e.g., "For me to avoid drinking alcohol is…" very difficult to very easy). The six items will be averaged together to obtain an overall score for Perceived Behavioral Control. Higher scores indicate greater perceived behavioral control to control drinking behavior.