Stephen Armeli

• Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University

Objective: Egocentric social network analyses show that drinking habits of college students’ friends predict personal alcohol consumption. To date, most of this research focused on between-person, cross-sectional, or long-term longitudinal designs to evaluate these effects. This study used intensive longitudinal methods to examine episode-specific...

Friendship-related stress is an understudied factor that may explain variation in coping-motivated and socially-motivated drinking among emerging adults. This study examined chronic and episodic friendship stress as predictors of drinking levels and motivations among emerging adults transitioning to post-college life. College drinkers reported drin...

Background: Recent evidence indicates that alcohol and other substance co-use, compared to alcohol-only use, might be more closely associated with negative reinforcement processes, and thus more likely during periods of increased stress. The present study examined this possibility by using data from an intensive longitudinal (daily) study of colleg...

The present study examined the mediating and moderating effects of affect-regulation (i.e., coping and enhancement) drinking motives in the relationship between eating disorder (ED) pathology and drinking outcomes. The sample included 419 undergraduate college students (52.0% female) who completed self-report questionnaire measures of ED pathology,...

Background: To examine whether individual differences in intensive longitudinal data-derived affective dynamics (i.e. positive and negative affect variability and inertia and positive affect-negative affect bipolarity) - posited to be indicative of emotion dysregulation - are uniquely related to drinking level and affect-regulation drinking motives...

Influential psychological theories hypothesize that people consume alcohol in response to the experience of both negative and positive emotions. Despite two decades of daily diary and ecological momentary assessment research, it remains unclear whether people consume more alcohol on days they experience higher negative and positive affect in everyd...

Influential psychological theories hypothesize that people consume alcohol in response to the experience of both negative and positive emotions. Despite two decades of daily diary and ecological momentary assessment research, it remains unclear whether people consume more alcohol on days they experience higher negative and positive affect in everyd...

Objective: Research links approval-contingent self-worth to college drinking but has not differentiated social and solitary consumption. High approval-contingent self-worth individuals might drink socially to derive approval. Methods: In a sample of 943 undergraduates, approval-contingent self-worth and drinking motives were measured in an initi...

Objective: To better understand how sleep is associated with alcohol consumption among college students, the present study tested whether last night’s sleep duration and current day fatigue were associated with being around others who were drinking that night and, if so, with alcohol consumption. Method: College student drinkers (N = 540; mean age...

Objective: Drink offers are related to increased alcohol consumption, which is linked to sexual activity among college students. However, offers of alcohol may increase the odds of sexual activity that night independent of the amount of alcohol consumed. Participants: 540 undergraduate students were recruited for a longitudinal study of daily exper...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has been a source of stress that may have increased drinking level overall and, more specifically, drinking to cope motivation. The current study tests whether specific domains of pandemic-related experiences are related to drinking to cope motivation and drinking level and whether drinking to cope motivation modera...

Objectives: We examined daily associations between drinking intentions and drinking behaviour and tested past drinking behaviour and current social environment as potential moderators of the daily intention-behaviour association. We expected both more frequent past drinking and being in a high drinking environment to weaken the intention-behaviour...

Interpersonal stress is a commonly reported drinking-related problem and evidence indicates that it is associated with drinking to cope (DTC) motivation. The preponderance of evidence for DTC motivation as a risk factor for increased interpersonal stress, however, comes mainly from studies examining between-person associations. Findings suggest tha...

In view of the importance of the need to belong in motivating behavior, we examined whether interpersonal and academic stress differentially influence social and solitary alcohol consumption and whether social and solitary alcohol consumption differentially predict next-day interpersonal and academic stress. Based on research suggesting that drinki...

Much is known about the types of strategies people use to regulate emotions. Less is known about individual differences that influence emotion regulation strategy selection. In this study, we tested the moderating role of negative emotion differentiation (NED; i.e., the ability to label and describe subtle differences among negative emotions) on th...

Background Depression is thought to generate stressful life events. However, other internalizing symptoms such as anxiety or post-traumatic stress and individual difference variables such as personality traits and alcohol use may contribute to stressful life events. Whether stress generation is specific to depression or generalized to these other v...

Objective: The current study examined the unique influences of romantic relationship status and episodic and chronic stress associated with relationships in predicting changes in alcohol consumption and drinking motivations from college to post-college life. Method: Moderate to heavy college student drinkers reported their drinking level and dri...

This study examined whether daily stressors and continuously monitored glucose levels and glucose variability predict daily diabetes symptoms. Fifty Latinos with type 2 diabetes were randomized to either diabetes education (DE-only; N = 23) or DE plus stress management and relaxation training (DE + SMR; N = 32). After treatment, for 7 days they wor...

Previous research suggests that, even in college, parents influence the alcohol consumption of their children directly and indirectly through peers. However, research has not tested whether face-to-face interactions with parents buffer students against social influences on drinking. In the current study, 1168 undergraduate students selected 5 peopl...

Although many college students view drinking as a means of gaining a community and being social, research has not established whether alcohol consumption influences students’ enjoyment and perceptions of how others view them or how this may differ based on the social or solitary nature of that consumption. The current study used online daily diary...

Evidence suggests that drinking cope (DTC) motivation becomes a greater risk factor for drinking-related problems as individuals progress through young adulthood. To test this, we examined how the effect of DTC motivation on a variety of drinking-related problems, controlling for drinking level, changed as individuals made the transition from colle...

Findings regarding the moderating influence of drinking motives on the association between affect and alcohol consumption have been inconsistent. The current study extended previous work on this topic by examining episode-specific coping, enhancement, conformity, and social drinking motives as moderators of the association between daytime experienc...

Despite the wealth of research on the effects of drinking norms on college students' alcohol consumption, researchers have not yet examined changes in drinking norms and their association with drinking level after students leave the college environment. The current study filled this gap by following students into postcollege life, measuring drinkin...

Daily levels of drinking to cope (DTC) have been found to be related to negative outcomes such as increased negative affect, and these effects vary across person. We examined whether daily-level effects of DTC motivation were related to two genetic polymorphisms (rs1360780 in the FKBP5 gene and 5-HTTLPR in SLC6A4) thought to be associated with mala...

Introduction: Avoidant coping plays an important role in the maintenance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, existing investigations have been limited in their assessment of coping as a static process - despite evidence that the coping strategies individuals use to manage stressors vary across time and contexts. Further, research ha...

Background: One-third of women who experience intimate partner violence (IPV) are identified as having alcohol use problems. Yet, little research has examined factors that may increase the risk of alcohol use among this high-risk population. Objectives: This study overcomes limitations of previous research by using micro-longitudinal methods to exa...

Emerging adults, particularly university students, who are physically active, drink more than their less physically active peers. We extended this between-person relationship to the within-person level of analysis, by examining whether students are more likely to drink on days when they exercise, and whether this within-person association remains a...

To further understand the role of drinking to cope (DTC) motivation in the development of drinking-related problems during young adulthood, we tested whether the association between episode-specific levels of nighttime DTC motivation and next-day negative affect and self-control depletion symptoms (SCDS) changed from college years to postcollege ye...

Objective: Stress management and relaxation (SMR) interventions can reduce symptoms of chronic disease and associated distress. However, there is little evidence that such interventions disrupt associations between symptoms and affect. This study examined whether SMR dampened the link between symptoms of hyperglycemia and proximal levels of affect....

Trauma exposure is linked to heavy drinking and drug use among college students. Extant research reveals positive associations between negative affect lability and both trauma exposure and alcohol use. This study aimed to extend past research by using daily diary methods to test whether (a) individuals with (versus without) trauma exposure experien...

Background: Expectancies of the positive and negative effects of drinking have been posited to be important moderators of the association between social anxiety and alcohol use. However, investigations of these interactive effects have not examined the moderating role of within-person daily variation in such expectancies. Methods: We used a multi-y...

Objective: This study investigated between-person and within-person associations among mean levels and variability in affect, diabetes self-care behaviors, and continuously monitored glucose in Latinos with type 2 diabetes. Methods: Fifty participants (mean age=57.8 [SD=11.7] years, 74% women, mean A1c=8.3% [SD=1.5%]) wore a 'blinded' continuous...

Background and aims: Alcohol and marijuana are widely used among college students. Emotion regulation strategies have been linked to alcohol and marijuana use, but little attention has been devoted to modeling the directionality of these associations. The aims of the current study were to test whether (a) daytime use of emotion regulation strategi...

Childhood trauma (CT) has been associated with various forms of emotion dysregulation (ED), including stress-reactivity, which is believed to be one of the mechanisms underlying the link between CT and psychological disorders. The purpose of the present study was to further this line of research by using an intensive longitudinal research design to...

Background & objectives: Emotional reactivity to stress is associated with both mental and physical health and has been assumed to be a stable feature of the person. However recent evidence suggests that the within-person association between stress and negative affect (e.g. affective stress-reactivity) may increase over time and in times of high s...

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is debilitating and costly. Identification and better understanding of risk factors influencing the development of AUD remain a research priority. Although early life exposure to trauma increases the risk of adulthood psychiatric disorders, including AUD, many individuals exposed to early life trauma do not develop psycho...

Objective: Theory suggests that state- and trait-like factors should interact in predicting drinking to cope (DTC) motivation, yet no research to date has demonstrated this at the drinking episode level of analysis. Thus, we examined whether daily variation in positive and negative affect and avoidance and active coping were associated with DTC mo...

Aims: Economists debate whether changes in availability of alcohol or cannabis are positively or negatively related to changes in use of the other substance. Implicit in these arguments are two competing, individual-level hypotheses-that people use alcohol and cannabis either as complements or substitutes for one another. This is the first study t...

Objective: Women with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are at high risk for substance use and intimate partner violence. Considering the effects of both PTSD and substance use such as poorer treatment outcomes and greater health/behavior problems, women experiencing intimate partner violence are a high-risk, under-researched group. Methods:...

Background: Research consistently shows drinking-to-cope (DTC) motivation is uniquely associated with drinking-related problems. We furthered this line of research by examining whether DTC motivation is predictive of processes indicative of poor emotion regulation. Specifically, we tested whether nighttime levels of episode-specific DTC motivation...

Consistent with research indicating that drinking to cope (DTC) motivation might exacerbate negative affective states within or immediately proximal to discrete drinking episodes, we examined whether yearly deviations in more global levels of DTC motivation prospectively predicted depressive and anxious affect over several weeks. College students (...

Research consistently shows a positive association between racial discrimination and problematic alcohol use among African Americans, but little is known about the micro-processes linking this pernicious form of stress to drinking. One possibility is that the cumulative effects of discrimination increase individuals' likelihood of negative-mood-rel...

Despite the strong relationship between smoking and health-related consequences, very few smokers quit. Heavy drinking is a significant risk factor for health consequences, and is implicated in persistent smoking and less success at quitting smoking. Self-efficacy (SE) to abstain from smoking is an important determinant of smoking outcomes and may...

Previous studies indicate that topiramate reduces alcohol use among problem drinkers, with one study showing that the effect was moderated by a polymorphism (rs2832407) in GRIK1, the gene encoding the GluK1 kainate subunit. We examined whether the interactive effect of medication and genotype (1) altered the association between daily self-efficacy...

Prior investigations have established between-person associations between drinking motives and both levels of alcohol use and social-contextual factors surrounding that use, but these relations have yet to be examined at the within-person level of analysis. Moreover, exploring previously posited subtypes of coping motives (i.e., coping with depress...

Using retrospective reports obtained during treatment visits in 138 heavy drinkers, we found that topiramate's reduction of heavy drinking was moderated by a polymorphism (rs2832407) in GRIK1, which encodes the GluK1 kainate subunit (Kranzler et al., 2014a). A subsequent analysis of that 12-week topiramate treatment trial showed similar effects of...

Objective: The goal of the present study was to examine whether within-person, episode-specific changes in drinking-to-cope (DTC) motivation from the previous evening were associated with concurrent daily mood and fatigue-related symptoms among college student drinkers (N = 1,421; 54% female). Method: We conducted an Internet-based daily diary s...

Identifying who, among problem drinkers, is best suited for moderation and has the greatest likelihood to control drinking has important public health implications. The current study aimed to identify profiles of problem drinkers who may be more or less successful in moderating drinking within the context of a randomized clinical trial of a brief t...

Despite evidence that African Americans are disproportionately affected by drinking to cope relative to European Americans, African American college students’ drinking motives remain understudied. Additionally, most research has only examined between-person differences in drinking to cope as a predictor of alcohol use, ignoring within-person variab...

Objective: This study examined whether global drinking-to-cope (DTC) motivation moderates negative mood-drinking contingencies and negative mood-motivation contingencies at the daily level of analysis. Method: Data came from a daily diary study of college student drinking (N = 1,636; 53% female; Mage = 19.2 years). Fixed-interval models tested w...

Introduction and aims: Motivational models of alcohol use posit opposing approach and avoidance motives related to drinking, yet no micro-longitudinal study of college students has examined avoidance motives [i.e. reasons for not drinking (RND)]. This exploratory study examined daily- and person-level correlates of students' RNDs to identify facto...

We (Kranzler et al., 2014) reported that topiramate 200 mg/day reduced heavy drinking days and increased abstinent days in 138 heavy drinkers whose treatment goal was to reduce drinking to safe levels. In that 12-week, placebo-controlled study, we measured drinking using the Timeline Follow-back method at each treatment visit. In addition to the in...

We examined among college students the interactive effects of drinking to cope motivation, anxiety and depression symptoms, and drinking level in predicting drinking-related problems. Using an Internet-based survey, participants (N = 844, 53% women) first reported on their drinking motives and monthly for up to 3 months, they reported on their drin...

Objective: Topiramate has been shown to reduce drinking and heavy drinking in individuals with alcohol dependence whose goal was to stop drinking. The authors evaluated the efficacy and tolerability of topiramate in heavy drinkers whose treatment goal was to reduce drinking to safe levels. Method: A total of 138 individuals (62.3% men) were rand...

Multiple theories posit that people with a history of depression are at higher risk for a depressive episode than people who have never experienced depression, which may be partly due to differences in stress-reactivity. In addition, both the dynamic model of affect and the broaden-and-build theory suggest that stress and positive affect interact t...

The current study used a person-centered approach (i.e. latent profile analysis) to identify distinct types of college student drinkers based on the predictions of motivational, social learning, and stress and coping theories of maladaptive drinking. A large sample (N=844; 53% female) of first-year undergraduates from two institutions, public and p...

Alcohol misuse is one of the most serious public health problems facing adolescents and young adults in the United States. National statistics shows that nearly 90% of alcohol consumed by youth under 21 years of age involves binge drinking and 44% of college students engage in high-risk drinking activities. Conventional alcohol interv...

Objective: Although home exercises are commonly prescribed following anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction and are considered important in obtaining successful rehabilitation outcomes, little is known about factors associated with the completion of such exercises. Consequently, this study was designed to identify predictors of adherence...

Alcohol norms are strong predictors of drinking. However, the extent to which norms influence behavior depends on how closely people attend to them; people are more likely to attend to norms when their affiliation needs are unfulfilled by members of their social networks (Cullum, O'Grady, & Tennen, 2011). Therefore we predicted that Perceived Socia...

Despite ample research demonstrating the role of motivation and self-efficacy in predicting drinking in the context of abstinence, little research explicitly explores their role in the context of moderation, and none have utilized daily diary methods. The purpose of this study was to (a) explore the concordance between global self-report and daily...

We previously reported moderating effects of age of onset of alcohol dependence (AD) and a functional polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) in the gene encoding the serotonin transporter protein in a sample of 134 individuals participating in a 12-week, placebo-controlled trial of sertraline. To understand more fully the effects seen in that study, we examined m...

Mental health problems among Southeast Asian refugees have been documented. However, longer term health consequences of mass violence as re-settled refugees age are less well described. This study investigated relationships among trauma symptoms, self-reported health outcomes, and barriers to healthcare among Cambodian and Vietnamese persons in Con...

To evaluate the role of the functional Asn40Asp polymorphism in the mu-opioid receptor gene on drinking behavior and naltrexone's ability to attenuate drinking, we used a daily diary method in a 12-week, randomized clinical trial of naltrexone to reduce drinking. Participants (n = 158 problem drinkers) were assigned to receive either daily or targe...

Covault et al. [Covault et al. (2007); Biol Psychiatry 61(5): 609-616] reported that the common functional polymorphism, 5-HTTLPR, in the serotonin transporter gene moderated the association between past-year stressful events and daily reports of drinking in a sample of European-American (EA) college students. We examined this effect in college stu...

We examined how group size and context-specific drinking norms corresponded to alcohol consumption and compliance with drinking offers using experience sampling methods. For 30 days, 397 college students reported daily on their alcohol consumption and social-context during natural social drinking events. Larger groups corresponded with greater alco...

We examined the link between social norms and active social influences occurring during natural social drinking contexts. Across 4 yearly measurement-bursts, college students (N = 523) reported daily for 30-day periods on drinking norms, drinking offers, how many drinks they accepted, and personal drinking levels during social drinking events. In c...

This study aims to describe the daily co-occurrence of physical, sexual, and psychological intimate partner violence (IPV) among substance-using, community-based women currently experiencing IPV. A micro-longitudinal study design was used to collect data daily from 49 women for 90 days. On the majority of days (62%), no IPV occurred; 27% of days we...

College student alcohol misuse is a major public health concern. According to a national survey, about 44% of students engage in high-risk drinking activities. This paper presents a machine learning approach to a secondary analysis of data collected in a college drinking study at the University of Connecticut Alcohol Research Center sponsored by th...

Pharmacotherapy studies in alcohol dependence (AD) are generally of short duration and do not include post-treatment follow-up. We examined the durability of treatment effects in a placebo-controlled trial of sertraline for AD. As previously reported, patients received 12 weeks of treatment with sertraline (n = 63) or placebo (n = 71), followed by...

A variety of typologies have been used to categorize alcoholism's diverse manifestations. Although the most widely studied typologies are dichotomous ones based on genetic epidemiologic findings or using cluster analytic methods, recent efforts have utilized a single item or the onset of a diagnosis of alcohol dependence to subtype individuals base...

This study examined how social-influence processes operate during specific drinking contexts as well as the stability and change in these processes throughout the college years. Using a measurement-burst design, a hybrid of longitudinal and daily diary methods, we assessed the relationship between event-specific descriptive drinking norms and perso...

The goal of this study was to clarify mixed findings regarding the association between dispositional social anxiety and drinking among college students by using a daily diary method to examine whether a within-person social-contextual event moderated the relationship between social anxiety and alcohol use. College students (n = 476) completed a mea...

Late-onset/low-vulnerability alcoholics (LOAs) appear to drink less when treated with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor than placebo, whereas early-onset/high-vulnerability alcoholics (EOAs) show the opposite effect. We conducted a 12-week, parallel-group, placebo-controlled trial of the efficacy of sertraline in alcohol dependence (AD). We...

A variant of the Implicit Association Test focusing on the association of sexual and aggressive themes was administered to 90 college students (61 women) and correlated with a series of variables based on participant history of sexually traumatic events. A history of sexual abuse was correlated with increased difficulties in processing sexual and a...

This study examined whether deficits in dealing with daily problems emerge before a depressive episode (i.e., pre-existing vulnerability) or after a depressive episode (i.e., psychosocial scar). Participants completed a 30-day daily diary in which they reported their most negative event of the day, their appraisals of that event, and their mood. Th...

Social norm-based interventions in college drinking are common but show mixed efficacy. Although such interventions assume a passive social-influence process, past research relied heavily on retrospective measures, leaving open the possibility that heuristic biases during recall may alternatively account for or inflate estimates of social influence...

We review methodological issues related to the quantitative assessment of thriving with interviews and paper-and-pencil scales. We emphasize two new paper-and-pencil measures of thriving, the Stress-Related Growth Scale (SRGS; Park, Cohen, & Murch, 1996) and the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996). These scales are desig...

We examined among college students (N = 530; 276 women) the moderating effects of avoidance (coping) and appetitive (social-enhancement) drinking motives on the within-person associations between anxious and depressive affect and drinking frequency and quantity. Once per year for up to 4 years participants completed standard measures of drinking mo...

IntroductionThe Daily Process ParadigmDaily Stress and Risk for Cardiovascular Disease: Myocardial Ischemia, Stress-reactive Blood Pressure Changes, and the Effects of Job Strain on Ambulatory Blood PressureThe Measurement and Temporal Dynamics of CopingThe Pursuit of Personal Goals in Daily Life with Chronic PainDaily Processes in Substance UseCon...

This study aimed to replicate and extend prior research showing that the targeted use of naltrexone is a useful strategy to reduce heavy drinking. We compared the effects of naltrexone with those of placebo in a sample of 163 individuals (58.3% male) whose goal was to reduce their drinking to safe limits. Patients received study medication (ie, nal...

A 30-day diary study examined personality moderators (neuroticism and extraversion) of the interaction between positive and negative daily events predicting daily negative affect and night-time stress. Multilevel analyses revealed positive daily events buffered the effect of negative daily events on negative affect for individuals low in neuroticis...

A 30-day daily diary study examined the relations among implicit self-esteem, interpersonal interactions, and alcohol consumption in college students. Multilevel analyses revealed that students with low implicit self-esteem drank more on days when they experienced more negative interpersonal interactions. In contrast, students with high implicit se...

Using data collected via handheld electronic diaries (EDs), we examined within-day associations between early-day negative moods and stress and subsequent time to drinking. A sample of 97 (n=48 women) adults recruited to participate in a drinking-reduction intervention study used EDs to record mood and interpersonal problems at randomly selected ti...

To examine the event-level association between alcohol consumption and the likelihood of unprotected sex among college-age young adults considering contextual factors of partner type and amount of alcohol consumed. A 30-day, Web-based, structured daily diary was used to collect daily reports of sexual behaviors and alcohol use from 116 sexually act...

This study was performed to examine whether a polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) in the serotonin transporter gene was related to college students' reports of relief drinking (drinking-to-cope motives) and whether it moderated the associations between negative life events and drinking to cope. We examined reward drinking (drinking-to-enhance motives) as a com...

Recent studies examining the moderating effects of polymorphic variation in opioid receptor genes have yielded conflicting results. We examined opioid receptor gene polymorphisms as moderators of the therapeutic effects of the opioid antagonist nalmefene. Participants (n = 272) were subjects who consented to the pharmacogenetic analysis of a multi-...

Most models of health behavior change applied to condom use behavior have focused on individual differences in theoretical constructs to explain condom use or nonuse, while ignoring the possibility that day-to-day within-person changes in these constructs may contribute to understanding behavior. The goal of the present study was to investigate day...

Positive experiences play an important role in buffering the effects of negative experiences. Although this process can play out in a myriad of contexts, the college context is one of particular importance because of significant concerns about student stress levels and alcohol abuse. Building on evidence that at least some students drink in respons...

A 30-day diary study examined the relations among trait self-esteem, negative romantic relationship interactions, and alcohol consumption. Multilevel analyses revealed that people with low trait self-esteem (compared with people with high trait self-esteem) drank more on days when they experienced more negative relationship interactions with their...

The purpose of this study was to examine among college students (N = 458; 249 women) whether drinking to cope (DTC) motives moderate the effect of daily negative mood states in predicting the onset of weekly drinking. Using a secure, Internet-based survey across 2 consecutive years, participants first completed measures of drinking motives and then...

To test whether individuals with at least one copy of the short (S) or long (L)(G) allele of the serotonin transporter polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) exhibit greater increases in anxiety, compared with L(A)L(A) individuals, under periods of high daily stress. Although this common polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene has been identified as a vuln...

Daily diary methods were used to examine changes in pain and negative mood over the first 6 weeks of rehabilitation after surgical reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). Participants (58 men and 33 women) completed measures of personal factors (i.e., age, athletic identity, neuroticism, optimism) before surgery and indices of daily...

We used an experience sampling design to examine the within-person, within-day associations among interpersonal stress, negative affect, and alcohol use, and how these associations varied as a function of alcohol-outcome expectancies (AOEs), avoidance coping style, sex, and neuroticism. Ninety-eight community adult drinkers who wanted to reduce the...