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Enhancement motives moderate the relationship between high arousal positive moods and drinking quantity: Evidence from a 22-day experience sampling study

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Abstract

Individuals who consume alcohol may be distinguished by their drinking motives. Enhancement motives involve drinking to enhance positive moods. Research on the moderating effect of enhancement motives on the within-person relation between daily positive mood and drinking has not differentiated between high- (e.g. hyper) and low-arousal (e.g. cheerful) positive moods. The present study addressed this limitation. We hypothesised that enhancement motives would positively moderate the relationship between mid-afternoon high-arousal positive mood and evening drinking. Using a palm pilot-based experience sampling design, 143 undergraduate drinkers answered daily surveys assessing positive mood (mid-afternoon) and drinks (evening) for 22 consecutive days. As hypothesised, enhancement motives strengthened the relation between high-arousal positive moods and drinking. Upon closer examination, the mood-drinking slope for those high in enhancement motives was unexpectedly flat, whereas the mood-drinking slope for those low in enhancement motives was negative. We demonstrated that high enhancement-motivated drinkers exhibit a high, stable drinking level, regardless of the intensity of their high-arousal positive mood. In contrast, low enhancement-motivated drinkers decrease their drinking when in a high-arousal positive mood state. Clinicians may be able to help reduce heavy alcohol consumption in enhancement-motivated drinkers by teaching them to reduce their drinking when in a high-arousal positive mood state. [Gautreau C, Sherry S, Battista S, Goldstein A, Stewart S. Enhancement motives moderate the relationship between high-arousal positive moods and drinking quantity: Evidence from a 22-day experience sampling study. Drug Alcohol Rev 2015]. © 2015 Australasian Professional Society on Alcohol and other Drugs.

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... Although PA is linked with several factors that may increase engagement in health enhancing behaviors and/or decrease engagement in risky health behaviors, research examining links between PA and actual engagement in health behaviors exhibits inconsistent findings, particularly when examined at the within-person level. For example, days with higher PA are sometimes associated with engagement in riskier health behaviors (Cameron et al., 2015), such as consumption of more calories and sugary food (Ashurst et al., 2018;Cardi et al., 2015), more alcohol use (Gautreau et al., 2015;Jones et al., 2021), and exhibit null associations with sleep (Ong et al., 2017). These seemingly contradictory findings highlight the need to determine under what conditions PA may be linked with engaging in risky versus health enhancing behaviors, not only to extend our theoretical framework, but also to inform prevention and intervention efforts. ...
... As previously noted, these differences in associations between PA and health behaviors may be partially dependent on an interaction between level of analysis and PA arousal. There is growing evidence that activated and deactivated PA seem to be differently associated with health behaviors when examined at the within-person level but perhaps not at the betweenperson level (Ashurst et al., 2018;Gautreau et al., 2015;Jones et al., 2021;Kalmbach et al., 2014;Kanning et al., 2015;Kanning & Schlicht, 2010;Pressman et al., 2017). That is, individuals reporting more activated or deactivated PA on average tend to report engaging in more health enhancing behaviors, which include both restorative behaviors such as sleep, as well as action oriented behaviors such as physical activity and lower alcohol consumption (Ong et al., 2011(Ong et al., , 2017Pressman et al., 2019;Pressman & Cross, 2018). ...
... That is, activated PA may indeed promote longterm health outcomes by helping individuals engage in more active health behaviors, and our results indicated that links between activated PA and health behaviors were generally stronger and more robust (to the inclusion of covariates) than were results for deactivated PA. Yet paradoxically, our results also contribute to growing body of work suggesting that activated PA is linked with health behaviors that are indicative of greater risk-taking (poorer diet), such as greater caloric intake and higher alcohol consumption (Ashurst et al., 2018;Cardi et al., 2015;Gautreau et al., 2015;Jones et al., 2021). More work is needed to disentangle if and how activated PA may be linked with more optimal long-term health outcomes while also being linked with (at least some) increased risk-taking health behaviors. ...
Article
Evidence is mixed with regard to whether positively valanced affect (PA) is associated with engagement in health behaviors. Both affective arousal (activated/ deactivated) and level of analysis (between and within-person) may influence such associations. Adults (N = 121; 25-65 years) completed ambulatory assessments of affect and daily reports of sleep, diet, and physical/sedentary activity. Patterns of association were generally consistent at between and within-person levels, although associations varied by arousal. Activated PA was positively associated with action tendencies (i.e., higher physical activity, lower sedentary activities) and riskier behaviors (such as poor diet) whereas deactivated PA was positively associated with engaging in satiety and rest (i.e., better diet, better sleep quality, and more sedentary activity). Results were maintained when covarying for indicators of relative socioeconomic advantage and neuroticism. Overall, arousal appears to be related to the nature of the associations between PA and health behaviors, highlighting the importance of assessing and evaluating a range of arousal states. K E Y W O R D S daily diary, diet, ecological momentary assessment, emotion, physical activity, sleep
... However, these goals were typically not those driving the design of these studies. The existing studies sought to establish the intraday temporal precedence of theoretically relevant triggers in the predrinking period (e.g., mood states, motives) and characterize the occurrence and intensity of subsequent drinking (Dvorak et al., 2014(Dvorak et al., , 2016Gautreau et al., 2015) or to capture variations in eBAC as criterion data against which to validate algorithms for passive detection of drinking (Gharani et al., 2017;Suffoletto et al., 2018). The high-frequency sampling designs were well-suited to addressing these aims. ...
... Some studies using this approach include scheduled prompts extending into the late night or early morning to capture extended drinking. In these studies, participants are instructed to ignore prompts occurring after bedtime (Gautreau et al., 2015) or provided with a method for muting alarms (Dvorak et al., 2014(Dvorak et al., , 2016. ...
... This is because many (perhaps most) prompts will be delivered when participants are not actively drinking. On the other hand, frequent assessment of nondrinking or predrinking states may be desirable for other research questions (e.g., Dvorak et al., 2014;Gautreau et al., 2015). ...
Article
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The current article critically reviews 3 methodological options for assessing drinking episodes in the natural environment. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) typically involves using mobile devices to collect self‐report data from participants in daily life. This technique is now widely used in alcohol research, but investigators have implemented diverse assessment strategies. This article focuses on “high‐resolution” EMA protocols that oversample experiences and behaviors within individual drinking episodes. A number of approaches have been used to accomplish this, including using signaled follow‐ups tied to drinking initiation, asking participants to log entries before and after individual drinks or drinking episodes, and delivering frequent signaled assessments during periods of the day when alcohol use is most common. Transdermal alcohol sensors (TAS) are devices that are worn continuously and are capable of detecting alcohol eliminated through the skin. These methods are appealing because they do not rely upon drinkers’ self‐report. Studies using TAS have been appearing with greater frequency over the past several years. New methods are making the use of TAS more tractable by permitting back‐translation of transdermal alcohol concentration data to more familiar estimates of blood alcohol concentration or breath alcohol concentration. However, the current generation of devices can have problems with missing data and tend to be relatively insensitive to low‐level drinking. An emerging area of research investigates the possibility of using mobile device data and machine learning to passively detect the user's drinking, with promising early findings. EMA, TAS, and sensor‐based approaches are all valid, and tend to produce convergent information when used in conjunction with one another. Each has a unique profile of advantages, disadvantages, and threats to validity. Therefore, the nature of the underlying research question must dictate the method(s) investigators select.
... On the analytical side, software packages such as Mplus, Stata and R have steadily brought the complex longitudinal analyses required to model these multiple influences within reach. These developments have made it possible to study the influence of personal, social and environmental characteristics such as drinking motives [6], peer support [7] or the drinking setting [8] on intra-individual processes such as changes in affect and alcohol consumption at a given time and place. ...
... For positive affect, however, the picture emerging from the included papers is less clear. Mohr et al. found that daily variability, but not mean levels in positive affect predicted daily drinking [8] whereas Gautreau et al. and Peacock et al. provided evidence in favour of the opposite, that is that not variability, but mean levels of (high arousal) positive affect predict daily drinking [6,9]. While sample differences cannot be ruled out as an explanation of this contrast, the sequence of events in time appears to be an important piece in the puzzle explaining the seemingly contradictory results. ...
... In contrast, constantly increasing or stable high positive affect succeeds consumption of this first drink, perhaps because of the psychoactive, mood enhancing or instrumental, socialising effects of alcohol at the relatively moderate levels of consumption examined in the included studies. Moreover, the findings reported by Gautreau et al. [6] suggest that those who usually drink for enhancement motives-that is to obtain high positive affect because of the psychoactive, mood-enhancing effects of alcohol-consumed high daily alcohol quantities independent of the mood they experienced that day. In other words, once people start to drink to purposely obtain a desired affective state, the current positive mood or its fluctuation no longer appears to play a major role. ...
... Results have been in conflict across these studies and within studies when multiple interaction effects were examined (i.e., assessing varying measures of affect and substance use within one study). Specifically, findings were mostly consistent with hypotheses (i.e., people high in coping motives are more likely to drink on days characterized by high negative emotions/stressors or low positive emotions) in four studies (Arbeau et al., 2011;Armeli et al., 2008;Grant et al., 2009;Mohr et al., 2005Mohr et al., , 2013, whereas results did support the validity of trait motives in 10 studies (Armeli et al., 2010;Gautreau et al., 2015;Littlefield et al., 2012;Mohr et al., 2001;Park et al., 2004;Sacco et al., 2015;Todd et al., 2003Todd et al., , 2005Todd et al., , 2009. Several studies have also examined trait motives beyond coping as well as additional daily processes. ...
... Several studies have also examined trait motives beyond coping as well as additional daily processes. Findings on the moderating effect of trait social and enhancement motives (alone or in combination) on daily mood-drinking relationships were also inconsistent (Armeli et al., 2010;Gautreau et al., 2015;Littlefield et al., 2012;Mohr et al., 2005Mohr et al., , 2013Sacco et al., 2015). With respect to other daily relationships, trait motives have moderated the within-persons effects of pregaming and social contact on drinking outcomes, but the directions of these moderation effects have varied and have also differed by gender (Kuntsche & Labhart, 2013;Smit et al., 2015;Thrul & Kuntsche, 2016). ...
Article
The motivational model of substance use posits that four motive subtypes (coping, enhancement, social, conformity) dynamically interact with contextual factors to affect decisions about substance use. Yet prior studies assessing the motivational model have relied on between-persons, cross-sectional evaluations of trait motives. We systematically reviewed studies using ecological momentary assessment (EMA; N = 64) on motives for substance use to examine methodological features of EMA studies examining the motivational model, support for the motivational model between and within individuals, and associations between trait motives and daily processes. Results of the reviewed studies provide equivocal support for the motivational model and suggest that EMA measures and trait measures of motives might not reflect the same construct. The reviewed body of research indicates that most studies have not examined the momentary and dynamic nature of the motivational model, and more research is needed to inform interventions that address heterogeneous reasons for substance use in daily life.
... Although this study did account for variation in level of arousal, it did not examine whether findings were related to increased arousal levels for PA, NA, or both. A second study of note assessed the moderating effects of enhancement motives on the relationship between daily high and low arousal PA and alcohol use in college students, finding no main effects (Gautreau, Sherry, Battista, Goldstein, & Stewart, 2015). ...
... Results were consistent with prior EMA studies with adult samples that have found significant within-person relationships between PA and alcohol use (Armeli et al., 2007;Duif et al., 2020;Mohr et al., 2013), but not NA and alcohol use (Armeli et al., 2007). Several mechanisms might explain the positive relationship between PA and alcohol use, including positive alcohol use expectancies, enhancement motives for drinking, and alcohol use context (Gautreau et al., 2015;Mohr et al., 2005;Treloar, Piasecki, McCarthy, Sher, & Heath, 2015). Our results did not support self-medication (Khantzian, 1997) or negative reinforcement ) models of substance use that suggest individuals primarily use substances to escape or ease NA. ...
Article
Objective Little is known about whether level of affective arousal (i.e., high vs. low) is associated with alcohol use and whether this relationship differs by valence (i.e., positive vs. negative affect) among adults. Methods. Participants were n=93 self-reported current drinkers (ages 25-65) who reported positive (PA) and negative affect (NA) seven times a day and alcohol use once a day for seven consecutive days. For each individual, mean levels of high arousal PA (e.g., excited), low arousal PA (e.g., satisfied), high arousal NA (e.g., frustrated), and low arousal NA (e.g., sad) were computed for each day. Results. Alcohol use was reported on 30% of person-days, with an average of 2.3 drinks consumed on drinking days. Heavy episodic drinking (4+/5+ drinks for women/men) occurred on 4% of days. After covarying for age, gender, and weekday, days with higher-than-usual levels of high arousal PA were associated with a 52% increase in the odds of consuming any alcohol and a 105% increase in the odds of engaging in heavy episodic drinking. Individuals reporting more low arousal PA on average had a 77% increase in the odds of heavy episodic drinking. No significant associations between high or low arousal NA and alcohol use were found. Conclusions. Greater PA, but not NA, was associated with heavy alcohol use at both the within- and between-person levels, perhaps attributable to social and enhancement drinking motives. Results differed by arousal, highlighting the importance of considering a wide range of affective states when examining alcohol use behavior.
... Cooper's (1994) motivational model of substance use includes enhancement motivation, in which drinking facilitates with the goal of enhancing positive mood or well-being. Positive affect appears to positively predict enhancement motives (Cooper, 1994), as well as consumption and alcohol-related problems at the state level (Cooper, 1994;Gautreau, Sherry, Battista, Goldstein, & Stewart, 2015;Simons et al., 2014). Similarly, constructs closely related to positive affect, such as extraversion (Kuntsche, von Fischer, & Gmel, 2008;Mezquita, Stewart, & Ruipérez, 2010) and sensation seeking (Read et al., 2003;Simons, Gaher, Correia, et al., 2005) indirectly predict consumption via enhancement motives. ...
... Positive affect predicted higher enhancement motives, which then exhibited a significant indirect effect on problems via alcohol consumption. This significant pathway is consistent with contemporary substance use models of positive reinforcement (de Wit & Phan, 2010) and previous research, which show indirect effects on problems via alcohol consumption (Cooper, 1994;Gautreau et al., 2015;Simons, Gaher, Correia, et al., 2005;Simons, Hahn, Simons, & Murase, 2017). Additionally, a significant relationship between distress tolerance and enhancement motives existed. ...
Article
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This study tested a multiple group path model in a sample of young adults (n = 402; 233 university participant pool/169 Amazon MTurk) linking positive and negative affect to alcohol consumption and problems via enhancement and coping motives, respectively. Motivational models of alcohol use suggest that individuals drink in order to alleviate negative affective states or to enhance positive moods or feelings. Deficits in modulating attention toward emotional experience (i.e., involuntary attention to emotion [IAE]); and poor distress tolerance may contribute to maladaptive patterns of substance use (i.e., negative reinforcement). As negative affect increases, those with deficits in the ability to efficiently attend to emotions as well as the inability to withstand distress may seek more external means of regulating unwanted or intrusive emotional experiences via alcohol. It was hypothesized that involuntarily attending to one's emotions would contribute to negative reinforcement drinking and problems. Coping motives were directly associated with alcohol-related problems, while enhancement motives were directly associated with problems both directly and indirectly via alcohol consumption. The hypothesized interaction between negative affect and IAE to coping motives was conditional upon levels of distress tolerance, with the moderating effect of involuntary attention being significant at high but not low levels of distress tolerance. Distress tolerance exhibited direct, inverse associations with alcohol-related problems. This pathway was significant over and above the direct effects of both coping motives and alcohol consumption. This suggests that while tolerance for emotional distress may reduce negative reinforcement drinking, it also fosters adaptive regulation when intoxicated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
... Studies incorporating ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) approaches have found opposing results in both PA and NA. Some EMA findings show affect as a predictor of drinking (Bresin & Fairbairn, 2019;Courtney & Russell, 2021;Dvorak et al., 2018;Russell et al., 2020;Treloar et al., 2015), while others have found null relationships (Gautreau et al., 2015;O'Donnell et al., 2019). A meta-analysis by Dora et al. (2023) combined data from 69 studies and found that, on average, PA is associated with more drinking, while the association with NA was null. ...
Article
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Objective: Drinking intention is a predictor of heavy-drinking episodes and could serve as a real-time target for preventive interventions. However, the association is inconsistent and relatively weak. Considering the affective context when intentions are formed might improve results by revealing conditions in which intention–behavior links are strongest and the predictive power of intentions is greatest. Method: We investigated the links between drinking intentions reported in the morning and same-day drinking behavior, moderated by positive and negative affect (PA, NA) in a sample of heavy-drinking young adults. Participants wore the SCRAM continuous alcohol monitor transdermal alcohol sensor anklet for 6 consecutive days in their natural environments and responded to daily ecological momentary assessments that included morning intentions to drink and PA/NA items. Drinking events and patterns were measured using morning-report counts and features from the sensor. Bayesian gamma-hurdle and Poisson multilevel models with noninformative priors tested day-level associations. We hypothesized that drinking intention–behavior associations would be strongest on days with high levels of PA, but we did not hypothesize directionality for the NA effect given the conflicting results in previous literature. Results: Day-level drinking intention–behavior associations were stronger on days with higher versus lower PA according to sensors features. Associations were also stronger on days with lower versus higher NA. Conclusions: The strength of intention–behavior links may partly depend on the affective contexts in which intentions are formed. Results could fine-tune intervention approaches by elucidating the affective contexts in which intentions may more clearly link to drinking behavior to reduce the intensity of an episode—better anticipating problematic drinking among young adults.
... Despite the popularity of these models, a large body of observational ecological momentary assessment data indicates that people do not consume more alcohol on days characterized by higher negative affect. Although some early studies provided preliminary support for the expected daily association between negative affect and alcohol use (e.g., Armeli et al., 2000;Park et al., 2004;Simons et al., 2005), further investigations as well as a recent meta-analysis of data from over 12,000 participants did not replicate this effect across a range of operationalizations of affect, study populations, as well as studyspecific and individual characteristics (Dora, Piccirillo, et al., 2023;Ehrenberg et al., 2016;Gautreau et al., 2015;O'Donnell et al., 2019). ...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: It is hypothesized that alcohol use is reinforcing when used as a strategy to cope with negative affect. Although the evidence for this hypothesis in observational data is weak, some experimental evidence suggests that the behavioral economic demand for alcohol increases immediately following a negative emotional event. We hypothesized that people show a higher demand for alcohol following negative (vs. neutral) mood inductions and that this effect is stronger in people who report heavier drinking compared to people who report lighter drinking as well as stronger on days characterized by higher coping motives and negative urgency. Method: 309 college students who reported recent alcohol consumption (MAUDIT = 6.86) completed the alcohol purchase task after being subjected to 12 mood inductions (six negative, six neutral, order randomized) on 12 separate days. Results: In our preregistered analyses, we found no evidence that the behavioral economic demand for alcohol was elevated following negative mood inductions. The mood inductions in our study were not as strong as has been reported in previous research, weakening the preregistered inferences. In exploratory analyses performed on a subset of the data in which the mood inductions worked as intended, demand was higher following negative mood inductions. Conclusions: The results of this study are not conclusive. In light of previous research, we consider these data to slightly increase our confidence that demand for alcohol is increased immediately following a negative emotional event.
... For example, social drinking motives may be in play when an individual desires to access social benefits, such as enjoying a party or a social gathering (Halim et al., 2012). Enhancement drinking motives may drive drinking to enhance positive moods (Gautreau et al., 2015). Specifically, a review of motives for drinking in adolescent and young adult samples revealed that positive reinforcement motives (social and enhancement) are more common motivators of drinking than negative reinforcement motives (coping and conformity) (Kuntsche et al., 2005). ...
Article
The first year of college is often marked by increased levels of alcohol consumption; first-year students also vary in their sense of fitting in on campus. Research has amply documented the links between social and enhancement drinking motives with various alcohol outcomes among college students. However, it is unclear how perceived levels of fitting in on campus potentially buffers or amplifies the relationship between drinking motives and drinking behavior. We explored whether perceptions of fitting in on campus moderated effects of social and/or enhancement drinking motives on drinks per week. A sample of 121 heavy drinking first year college students (50 % female, 58 % non-Latinx White, M = 18 years of age) were assessed twice in their first semester (baseline, 3 months) in the context of an alcohol-specific intervention. Hierarchical linear regressions were conducted to test whether drinking motives (social and enhancement) at baseline prospectively predicted drinks per week at 3 months. We hypothesized a positive association between both drinking motives and drinks per week; whether fitting in moderates these relationships was exploratory. Regression analyses yielded non-significant main effects of social motives, enhancement motives, and feelings of fitting in on drinks per week. There was no significant interaction for social motives, but the interaction between enhancement motives and fitting in was significant. Participants with a low sense of fitting in had a strong positive relationship between enhancement motives and drinks per week. Improving perceptions of fitting in for first-year college students may potentially reduce the association between enhancement drinking motives and drinks per week.
... A variety of moderators and mediators have been proposed and tested in previous studies, such as drinking motives (e.g., Ehrenberg et al., 2016;Gautreau et al., 2015;Grant et al., 2009;Hussong et al., 2005;Stevenson et al., 2019;Wycoff et al., 2020), urgency (e.g., Bold et al., 2017;J. S. Simons et al., 2010), and craving (Waddell et al., 2021). ...
Article
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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 everyday life. In this preregistered meta-analysis, we synthesized the evidence for these daily associations between affect and alcohol use. We included individual participant data from 69 studies (N = 12,394), which used daily and momentary surveys to assess affect and the number of alcoholic drinks consumed. Results indicate that people are not more likely to drink on days they experience high negative affect, but are more likely to drink and drink heavily on days high in positive affect. People self-reporting a motivational tendency to drink-to-cope and drink-to-enhance consumed more alcohol, but not on days they experienced higher negative and positive affect. Results were robust across different operationalizations of affect, study designs, study populations, and individual characteristics. These findings challenge the long-held belief that people drink more alcohol following increases in negative affect. Integrating these findings under different theoretical models and limitations of this field of research, we collectively propose an agenda for future research to explore open questions surrounding affect and alcohol use.
... The study was pre-registered on Open Science Framework. Participants were deemed eligible to take part in the research if they consumed alcohol on at least four occasions in the month prior to registering to take part in the study (following Gautreau et al., 2015 and to ensure participants are sufficiently frequent drinkers to be likely to drink during 7-day sampling period) and were aged 18þ years (making them legally permitted to drink in the UK). Having a mood disorder or alcohol use disorder and/or using illicit (unprescribed) drugs within the last three months were exclusion criteria. ...
Article
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COVID-19-related lockdown provided an opportunity to scrutinise alcohol consumption patterns in a historically unique context. This exploratory study examined how people’s thoughts during the day may be related to their drinking during confinement to their homes. Using ecological momentary assessment, 77 UK participants (61% female, Mage = 27.26) used their smartphones to respond to thrice-daily prompts, recording thoughts (in response to open-ended probes) and alcohol consumption over one-week during a period of strict lockdown in the United Kingdom. Thoughts were classified into nine categories (Work, Food, Leisure, Health, Self, Other, Past, Future, Miscellaneous) and exploratory analysis suggested that thinking about ways to spend leisure time was associated with decreased alcohol consumption, while thinking about alcohol was associated with decreased subsequent consumption. None of the other thought categories were related to alcohol consumption. Overall, findings indicate that thinking about ways to spend free time may be a protective factor against alcohol consumption.
... However, findings with regard to the extent to which people's current positive affective states impact drinking behavior have been varied. While some studies have found that positive mood increases within-day alcohol consumption (23)(24)(25)(26)(27), others indicate that positive affect has no impact on daily alcohol consumption volume (28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34) or on alcohol craving (35). In view of this inconsistent support for the positive reinforcement model of alcohol consumption in non-clinical populations, formal interrogation of the findings is required to shed light on the relationship between positive mood and the likelihood of drinking. ...
Article
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Background: Recent meta-analytical findings indicate that affect regulation plays an important role in alcohol craving, consumption volume, and substance use. However, in view of mixed findings, the affect and drinking likelihood literature remains in need of clarification and consolidation. Objectives: This systematic review with meta-analyses interrogated the results from peer-reviewed studies among non-clinical populations that examined the relationship between daily affective states and intraday likelihood of alcohol consumption. Method: A PRISMA guided search of PsychINFO, PsycARTICLES, Science Direct, Wiley Online Library, PubMed, SCOPUS, and JSTOR databases was conducted. Multilevel meta-analyses yielded 11 eligible negative affect studies (2751 participants, 23 effect sizes) and nine studies on positive affect (2244 participants, 14 effect sizes). Results: The pooled associations between intra-day affect and alcohol consumption likelihood revealed no significant association between negative affective state and drinking likelihood (OR = .90, 95% CI [.73, 1.12]) and that positive affect was associated with increased drinking likelihood (OR = 1.17, 95% CI [1.09, 1.27]). Egger's test, P-curve, fail-safe N, and selection models analyses suggested that the obtained results were unlikely to be the product of publication bias and p-hacking alone. Conclusions: Results converge to suggest that, independent of age, affect measure used, and study design, a significant albeit modest relationship between positive affect and alcohol consumption likelihood exists, which does not appear to be the case for negative affect. In conjunction with other recent meta-analyses, current findings help map out a more nuanced understanding of the affect-alcohol/substance use relationship, with potential implications for interventions.
... Of note, additional related research has examined whether drinking motives moderated the associations between affect and alcohol use (Votaw & Witkiewitz, 2021), with some studies finding moderation for coping motives (for exception, see Hamilton et al., 2020). However, mixed findings have been noted for enhancement motives as a moderator (Votaw & Witkiewitz, 2021), although a potential buffering effect has been found such that positive affect may be associated with decreased drinking among individuals characterized as low enhancement-motivated drinkers (Gautreau et al., 2015). Together, these conflicting findings suggest that additional research is needed to gain clarity on how these regulatory processes unfold between individuals and within situations. ...
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Objective: Women with sexual assault (SA) histories report heavier and more frequent drinking. Consistent with the motivational model of alcohol use, women with SA histories may consume alcohol to both downregulate negative emotions and upregulate positive ones. The present event-level study used a Bayesian multilevel moderated mediation approach to examine the extent to which women's alcohol use and intoxication was influenced by coping and enhancement drinking motives to downregulate or upregulate affect, respectively. Method: Women ages 21-30 were recruited from the community to participate in a larger study that included a 32-day daily diary assessment of affect, drinking motives, and alcohol use. Results: We found consistent support for women's tendencies to be motivated to drink to cope or enhance negative or positive affect, respectively, and those drinking motives were associated with indicators of increased drinking. Becoming intoxicated to downregulate negative emotion was common and this pathway was particularly strong for women who reported more severe SA histories. Although women with more severe SA histories were generally more likely to drink more, they were not likely to do so as a way to enhance positive experiences. Conclusions: Alcohol interventions that provide adaptive regulatory strategies are needed for women who experience increased negative or positive affect, with a particular focus on self-medication for young women with more severe SA histories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... In many ways, students might experience happy feelings, and one good example can be observed at the end of the academic term. With peers' encouragement/approval, it might be di cult to resist the temptation of excessive drinking, which is in agreement with the result of previous research related to enhancement motive and social-contextual factors 49,50 . ...
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Machine intelligence has garnered immense attention owing to its ability to discover hidden patterns in abstract and high-dimensional datasets. However, its success is often limited by the fundamental bottleneck of data scarcity. In this work, we offer a universal data augmentation solution to resolve this impasse. We first discovered the hidden knowledge within the existing scarce dataset using the machine learning (ML) technique and then synthetically augmented the dataset according to its feature importance. In principle, scarce and augmented datasets should share a common statistical property. Using this property, we specifically study the scarce dataset representing the binge-drinking behavior of university students and show that our method is effective in augmenting a limited dataset with high fidelity. The current work challenges the status quo in data scarcity with rule-less-based ML, which removes the ostensible barrier that prevents the application of data-driven techniques to the data scarce clinical research.
... Despite the popularity of these models, a large body of observational ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data indicates that people do not consume more alcohol on days characterized by higher negative affect. Although some early studies provided preliminary support for the expected daily association between negative affect and alcohol use (e.g., Armeli et al., 2000;Park et al., 2004;Simons et al., 2005), further investigations as well as a recent meta-analysis of data from over 12,000 participants did not replicate this effect across a range of operationalizations of affect, study populations, as well as study-specific and individual characteristics (Dora, Piccirillo, et al., 2023;Ehrenberg et al., 2016;Gautreau et al., 2015;O'Donnell et al., 2019). ...
Preprint
Objective: Influential theoretical models hypothesize that alcohol use is an especially potent reinforcer when used as a strategy to cope with negative affect. Although the evidence for this idea in observational data is weak, some experimental evidence suggests that the behavioral economic demand for alcohol increases immediately following a negative emotional event.Because existing studies testing the effect of negative mood inductions on the demand for alcohol have several methodological limitations and do not take inter- and intraindividual variability into account, we developed an improved experimental design to increase our confidence in any potential within-person effect of negative mood inductions on alcohol demand as well as to test whether this effect exhibits systematic inter- and intraindividual variability. We hypothesize that people will show a higher demand for alcohol following negative compared to neutral mood inductions and that this effect is stronger in heavy compared to light drinkers as well as stronger on days characterized by higher coping motives and negative urgency. Methods: 320 college students will complete the alcohol purchase task after being subjected to twelve mood inductions (six negative, six neutral) on twelve separate days. Results:Conclusions:
... Some data suggest that people are more likely to drink and consume more alcohol on days characterized by the experience of negative or positive moods (Armeli et al., 2000;Park et al., 2004;J. Simons et al., 2005), while other studies demonstrated null findings (Gautreau et al., 2015;O'Donnell et al., 2019). Thus, the goal of this study was to synthesize the evidence for the associations between affect and alcohol use via a large-scale meta-analysis of individual participant data. ...
Preprint
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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 everyday life. In this preregistered meta-analysis, we synthesized the evidence for these daily associations between affect and alcohol use. We included individual participant data from 69 studies (N = 12,394), which used daily and momentary surveys to assess affect and the number of alcoholic drinks consumed. Results indicate that people do not drink more often on days they experience high negative affect, but are more likely to drink and drink heavily on days high in positive affect. People self-reporting a motivational tendency to drink-to-cope and drink-to-enhance were estimated to consume more alcohol, but not to consume more alcohol on days they experience higher negative and positive affect. Results were robust across different operationalizations of affect, study designs, study populations, and individual characteristics. Based on our findings, we collectively propose an agenda for future research to explore open questions surrounding affect and alcohol use.
... In studies examining the within-person, daily relationships between motives and drinking in young adults, studies have often found a strong relationship between enhancement motives and increased alcohol consumption that day, similar to between-person findings (Hamilton et al., 2020;O'Donnell et al., 2019;Patrick & Terry-McElrath, 2021). In particular, the relationship between enhancement motives and alcohol consumption is stronger when positive affect is higher (Dvorak et al., 2014;Gautreau et al., 2015;Stevenson et al., 2019). Social motives have not been as consistently included in within-person studies of drinking, but some studies have found that social motives predict social consumption (i.e., drinking with others present; Hamilton et al., 2020) and HID (Patrick & Terry-McElrath, 2021;White et al., 2016), although others have found no association with alcohol use (Blevins et al., 2018;O'Donnell et al., 2019). ...
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Objective: We investigated the relationships between daily affect, drinking motives, likelihood of drinking, and intensity of drinking, particularly high-intensity drinking (HID), in a sample of young adults. We also explored differences in our outcomes before versus during the early coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Method: In the springs of 2019 and 2020, young adult drinkers (N = 633) completed 14 consecutive morning surveys (each year) characterizing the prior day’s affect, motives, and alcohol use. We examined between-person and within-person associations of affect and motives with two outcomes: any drinking and drinking intensity on drinking days (1 = moderate drinking [1–3 drinks for women, 1–4 drinks for men], 2 = binge drinking [4–7 for women, 5–9 for men], and 3 = HID [8+ for women, 10+ for men]). Results: Young adults reported higher positive affect on drinking days and higher negative affect on nondrinking days. On days when young adults reported greater enhancement motives, positive affect was strongly related to HID. During the early COVID-19 pandemic, young adults were more likely to report drinking, but did not drink more heavily unless they also reported drinking for social motives. Conclusions: These results suggest that heightened social, coping, and enhancement motives are risk factors for drinking in young adults. They also suggest that young adults perceive their mood to be better on drinking days, particularly when they were drinking to enhance positive affect. Results are consistent with a positive affect regulation model (i.e., drinking to increase positive affect), but not a negative affect regulation model (i.e., drinking to cope with negative affect).
... The endorsement of drinking for enhancement has been shown to be associated with alcohol problems in other samples of drinkers [47]. Perhaps HIV/ HCV individuals who drink to enhance their experience derive such enjoyment from alcohol consumption that they cannot appreciate its negative consequences [57] or the need to curb their behavior. Such an association suggests that there may be a subgroup of an already high-risk population who is particularly resistant to changing their harmful health behaviors. ...
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Alcohol consumption is common among individuals coinfected with HIV and hepatitis C (HCV) despite the uniquely harmful effects in this population. Limited research has examined factors that could influence drinking reduction or cessation among HIV/HCV coinfected persons; this study investigates motivation to quit. Participants were 110 alcohol-consuming HIV/HCV coinfected patients recruited from medical clinics. Participants self-reported 90-day drinking frequency and intensity; alcohol-related problems; reasons to quit drinking; reasons to drink; and motivation to quit drinking. Participants consumed alcohol on 54.1 (± 26.9) of the past 90 days. In a multivariate model that controlled for demographic variables, motivation to quit drinking was directly associated with alcohol-related problems (βy·x = 0.35, p = .007) and reasons to quit drinking (βy·x = 0.23, p = .021), and inversely associated with drinking for enhancement (βy·x = − 0.36, p = .004). This study identified several factors associated with motivation to quit drinking in a sample of alcohol-consuming HIV/HCV patients.
... Drinking to cope with negative affect (NA), or to enhance positive affect (PA), may lead to risky alcohol use patterns (6)(7)(8)(9)(10). The self-medication hypothesis (11) and expectancy theory (12) propose how people may resort to alcohol consumption to alleviate NA, or to augment PA. ...
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Background: Consuming alcohol for coping with negative affect (NA) or enhancing positive affect (PA) may lead to risky drinking patterns. Previous research has yielded mixed findings regarding these affective drinking associations. Objectives: To examine support for the self-medication and expectancy models of alcohol use in an adult community sample, by examining reciprocal associations between alcohol consumption and NA and PA within and between persons. Methods: During seven consecutive days, 162 adults from the community (109 female) reported their affective experiences and alcohol consumption, following a signal contingent ecological momentary assessment protocol on their smartphones. Results: Within-person daily NA preceding the first drinking event was associated with increased likelihood of same-day alcohol consumption. Within-person momentary NA was associated with a decrease in the amount of next-moment alcohol consumption. Within-person momentary PA was positively associated with likelihood of next-moment alcohol consumption. Between persons, levels of daily and momentary NA and PA were not associated with any index of alcohol consumption. The intercepts and slopes of NA were not significantly different before and after alcohol consumption. The intercept of PA was higher after alcohol consumption, whereas the slope of PA decreased after alcohol consumption. Conclusion: In the current sample affective drinking was a within-person process (i.e. persons were sensitive to their varying levels of affect). Some support was found for the self-medication and expectancy models. People may drink for coping with NA, but may also be at risk for developing affective drinking patterns in response to PA.
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Background Positive alcohol expectancies are linked to increased alcohol use among college students. Difficulties regulating emotion have been shown to moderate this relationship, though little research accounts for differences based on the valence of the emotion being regulated. Objective To examine the independent moderating roles of positive and negative emotion dysregulation on the association between positive alcohol expectancies and alcohol use. Methods College students (N = 165, Mage = 20.48, SDage = 1.90; 66.1 % Female; 66.7 % White; 65.5 % non-Hispanic) who reported regular substance use (≥ 3 times in the past week) completed a one-time survey. Linear regression analyses with moderation were conducted. Results Correlational analyses suggested that positive alcohol expectancies, positive emotion dysregulation, and negative emotion dysregulation were positively associated with greater alcohol use. Linear regression analyses indicated that difficulties with positive emotion regulation moderated the relationship between positive alcohol expectancies and alcohol use. However, difficulties with negative emotion regulation did not moderate this relationship. College students who reported greater positive alcohol expectancies and concurrently greater difficulties with positive emotion regulation also report greater alcohol consumption, compared to those who reported greater positive alcohol expectancies and fewer difficulties regulating positive emotion. Discussion Difficulties with positive, not negative, emotion regulation may serve as a risk factor for hazardous alcohol use in college students. Findings may inform the modification of existing intervention programs across university counseling centers and other health sectors to promote the development of positive emotion regulation skills for individuals who endorse positive emotion regulation difficulties, thereby reducing hazardous alcohol use amid this high-risk developmental period.
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Coronavirus disease (COVID-19)-related lockdown provided an opportunity to examine the relationship between affect and alcohol consumption in a historically unique context. To shed light on mixed findings regarding the interplay between affective states and alcohol consumption, the present study examined how affective states and affect fluctuations impact drinking during confinement of people to their homes. It also examined the extent to which the social context moderated the affect-consumption relationship. Having preregistered study protocols, methods, and hypotheses, 87 U.K. participants (34% male, Mage = 29.33) used their smartphones to respond to thrice daily prompts, recording their affective states, alcohol consumption, and social context over 1 week. Multilevel modeling suggested that being with someone (vs. alone) was associated with increased alcohol consumption. Increased drinking on the previous day was associated with increased next day negative affect, and the number of household occupants was associated with decreased negative affect. Preconsumption affect was not associated with subsequent drinking. These findings point to a complex relationship between alcohol consumption, social context, and negative affect. The opportunity to interact with others during lockdown was generally associated with decreased negative affect in the moment. However, the presence of others was associated with increased consumption which, in turn, predicted elevated next-day negative affect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
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Influential theoretical models hypothesize that alcohol use is an especially potent reinforcer when used as a strategy to cope with negative affect. Although the evidence for this idea in observational data is weak, some experimental evidence suggests that the behavioral economic demand for alcohol increases immediately following a negative emotional event. Because existing studies testing the effect of negative mood inductions on the demand for alcohol have several methodological limitations and do not take inter- and intraindividual variability into account, we developed an improved experimental design to increase our confidence in any potential within-person effect of negative mood inductions on alcohol demand as well as to test whether this effect exhibits systematic inter- and intraindividual variability. We hypothesize that people will show a higher demand for alcohol following negative compared to neutral mood inductions and that this effect is stronger in heavy compared to light drinkers as well as stronger on days characterized by higher coping motives and negative urgency. Three hundred twenty college students will complete the alcohol purchase task (APT) after being subjected to 100 mood inductions (six negative, six neutral) on 20 separate days.
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While self-medication and positive and negative reinforcement models of alcohol use suggest that there is an association between daily affect and alcohol consumption, findings within the academic literature have been inconsistent. This pre-registered systematic review meta-analytically interrogated the results from studies amongst non-clinical populations that examine the relationship between daily affective states and alcohol consumption volume. PRISMA guided searches of PsychINFO, PsycARTICLES, Science Direct, PubMed, SCOPUS, and JSTOR databases were conducted. When both laboratory and field studies were included, meta-analyses with robust variance estimation yielded 53 eligible studies on negative affect (8355 participants, 127 effect sizes) and 35 studies for positive affect (6384 participants, 50 effect sizes). The significant pooled associations between intra-day affect and alcohol consumption were r = .09, [.03, .14] for negative affect, and r = .17, [.04, .30] for positive affect. A small-to-medium sized effect (d = .275, [.11, .44]) of negative affect on daily alcohol consumption volume was found in laboratory studies (14 studies, 1100 participants). While publication bias was suspected, P-curve analyses suggested that the results were unlikely to be the product of publication bias and p-hacking alone, and selection model analysis revealed no significant differences in results when publication bias was accounted for. For negative affect, using number of drinks as the measure of alcohol consumption was associated with lower effect sizes. For positive affect, the results demonstrated a decline of this observed effect over time. Overall, findings point towards the possibility of developing an affect intensity regulation theory of alcohol use. Conceptualizing the mood-alcohol nexus in terms of affect intensity regulation may afford a more parsimonious explanation of alcohol consumption rather than viewing the behavior as being shaped by either positive or negative affective states.
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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 experiences of positive and negative affect and evening social and solitary alcohol consumption. Nine hundred and six participants completed daily diary surveys measuring their daily affect and evening drinking behavior each day for 30 days during college and again 5 years later, after they had left the college environment. Results of multilevel modeling analyses suggest that the associations between affect, drinking motives, and alcohol consumption are not straightforward. Specifically, whereas daytime positive affect and non-coping drinking motives predicted greater social consumption, daytime positive affect was related to lower solitary alcohol consumption among college students who were low in state social drinking motives. In addition, coping motives were related to greater social consumption during college and greater solitary alcohol consumption after college. Future research should continue to examine these episode-specific drinking motives in addition to trait-level drinking motives.
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Introduction: Daily assessment studies have examined how day specific factors, such as affect, social context, and drinking motives, alongside dispositional drinking motives, predict young adults' drinking. However, these studies did not examine how the interplay between drinking motives (dispositional and day specific) and multiple features of the drinking situation predict drinking with respect to either the initial decision to drink or the quantity of alcohol consumed. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) via smartphone technology, enables us to address this gap by evaluating to what extent dispositional drinking motives and day specific factors are associated with: a) the initiation of drinking episodes and; b) the quantity of alcohol consumed. Methods: Participants were 83 young adults (63 female) aged 18 to 30 (M = 21.42, SD = 3.09) who resided in Australia and participated in an EMA study for 21 days via their smartphone. On a daily basis, participants received three random-interval prompts that measured momentary affect, drinking motives, social context (e.g., people present in the social context and if these individuals are drinking), and alcohol use. Results: A multilevel hurdle analysis found that young adults were more likely to both initiate a drinking episode and consume a higher quantity of alcohol if they were surrounded by other people who were drinking and were motivated to drink to conform to the reference group. Conclusions: This study is the first of its kind to demonstrate that different drinking behaviors (i.e., initiation and quantity of alcohol consumed) are associated with a similar set of predictors. Drinking-based interventions that address these risk factors could effectively reduce risky drinking as it would intervene on both the decision to initiate alcohol use, and the decision to continue drinking.
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Implicit and explicit alcohol-related cognitions were measured in 2 dimensions: positive-negative (valence) and arousal-sedation, with 2 versions of the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. Schwartz) and related explicit measures. Heavy drinkers (n = 24) strongly associated alcohol with arousal on the arousal IAT (especially men) and scored higher on explicit arousal expectancies than light drinkers (n = 24). On the valence IAT, both light and heavy drinkers showed strong negative implicit associations with alcohol that contrasted with their positive explicit judgments (heavy drinkers were more positive). Implicit and explicit cognitions uniquely contributed to the prediction of 1-month prospective drinking. Heavy drinkers' implicit arousal associations could reflect the sensitized psychomotor-activating response to drug cues, a motivational mechanism hypothesized to underlie the etiology of addictive behaviors.
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Recent research suggests it is important to take individual differences into account when attempting to predict drinking or treat alcohol problems. One variable thought to exert a potent proximal influence on alcohol consumption is an individual’s self-reported motives for drinking (Cox and Klinger, 1988). Having high levels of internal, emotion-management motives for drinking, such as coping motives (CM; drinking to relieve sadness) or enhancement motives (EM; drinking to enhance happiness), is thought to be “risky” because internal, more than external (or social/affiliative), motives predict heavy and problematic alcohol consumption (cf. Cooper, 1994). Thus, the goal of recent alcohol research has been to identify the unique emotional antecedents of these “risky” reasons for drinking of EM and CM. Several studies provide indirect evidence suggesting that negative mood states prompt drinking specifically for CM drinkers, and that positive mood states prompt drinking specifically for EM drinkers; but only one recent unpublished study, conducted in our laboratory, has directly examined this hypothesis. While our chapter will include a review of previous relevant research, the primary purpose of our chapter shall be to report on the findings obtained from this latter investigation. In this investigation, 73 undergraduates who endorsed either extreme CM or EM for drinking were randomly assigned to listen to either positive or negative musical mood induction procedures (MMIP; Mongrain and Trambakoulos, 1997). Following a mood manipulation check, they were then asked to complete a mock taste-rating task, an excellent unobtrusive measure of drinking behaviour (cf. Higgins and Marlatt, 1973). As hypothesized, EM drinkers in the positive mood condition (vs. other groups) had significantly higher levels of average alcohol (but not non-alcohol) consumed. Unexpectedly, however, this effect was only significant for male (and not female) participants. Also as hypothesized, CM drinkers in the negative mood condition (vs. other groups) had a significantly higher ratio of alcohol consumed, as a function of total beverage consumed. Unexpectedly, however, this effect was only significant for female (and not male) participants. We suggest that emotions may frequently and powerfully influence drinking decision-making, but that mood-drinking relations cannot be adequately understood without a consideration of individual difference variables, such as drinking motives and gender. We conclude this chapter with an integration of the findings reviewed which highlights important areas for future research, as well as key implications for understanding and managing alcohol misuse.
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This study investigated whether Coping Motivated and Enhancement Motivated drinkers differ in their degree of semantic activation of alcohol concepts on a primed Stroop colour-naming task following exposure to negative and positive affect primes, respectively. Participants were 48 undergraduates (not necessarily problem drinkers) who had elevated scores on the Coping Motivated or Enhancement Motivated subscale of the Drinking Motives Questionnaire - Revised. The Stroop task involved negative, positive and neutral primes that preceded alcohol and no-alcohol target words. As hypothesized, Coping Motivated drinkers showed semantic activation of alcohol concepts following exposure to negative but not neutral primes. Also as hypothesized, Enhancement Motivated drinkers showed semantic activation of alcohol concepts following exposure to positive but not negative primes. Unexpectedly, semantic activation of alcohol concepts was also observed among Coping Motivated drinkers following positive primes and among Enhancement Motivated drinkers following neutral primes. Theoretical implications are discussed, as are implications for improving cognitive behavioral interventions for problem drinkers.
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Objective: The purpose of this study was to establish the frequency of positive and negative alcohol-related consequences during the first year of college and to evaluate gender, race/ethnicity, time of year, alcohol use, and intoxication as predictors of consequences using frequent assessments. Method: Participants (N = 1,053; 57.5% female) completed biweekly assessments of alcohol use and positive and negative alcohol-related consequences throughout the year. Results: The majority of drinkers reported both positive and negative consequences. Having a good time and feeling less stressed were the most commonly reported positive consequences. Blackouts and getting physically sick were the most commonly endorsed negative consequences. At the weekly level, number of drinking days, drinks per drinking day, and estimated blood alcohol concentration (eBAC, reflecting intoxication) were significantly related to all consequences after controlling for demographics and time of year. Negative consequences had stronger associations with number of drinks and eBAC than positive consequences did. With each additional drink consumed on a drinking day, the incidence of negative consequences more than doubled (incidence rate ratio [IRR] = 2.34, 95% CI [2.19, 2.50]), whereas the incidence of positive consequences increased by about half (IRR = 1.51, 95% CI [1.47, 1.56]). The consequence with the largest gender difference was regretted sex, with women reporting it more often. Few racial/ethnic differences were found in report of negative consequences. Greater positive and negative consequences were endorsed at the beginning of both academic semesters. Conclusions: As number of drinks and eBAC increase, the relative odds of a negative consequence are higher than that of a positive consequence. Alcohol interventions could promote greater awareness of the likelihood of specific consequences and could highlight that positive consequences are associated with lower levels of drinking.
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Alcohol use can be understood as a strategic behavior, such that people choose to drink based on the anticipated affective changes produced by drinking relative to those produced by alternative behaviors. This study investigated whether people who report drinking for specific reasons via the Drinking Motives Questionnaire-Revised (DMQ-R; Cooper, 1994) actually experience the alcohol effects they purportedly seek. As a secondary goal, we examined relations between drinking motives and indices of the amount of alcohol consumed. Data were drawn from 3,272 drinking episodes logged by 393 community-recruited drinkers during a 21-day Ecological Momentary Assessment investigation. After accounting for selected covariates, DMQ-R enhancement motives uniquely predicted real-time reports of enhanced drinking pleasure. DMQ-R coping motives were associated with reports of increased drinking-contingent relief and punishment. Enhancement motives uniquely predicted consuming more drinks per episode and higher peak intra-episode estimated blood alcohol concentration. The findings extend the evidence for the validity of the DMQ-R motive scores by demonstrating that internal drinking motives (enhancement and coping) are related to the experienced outcomes of drinking in the manner anticipated by theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
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In recent studies of the structure of affect, positive and negative affect have consistently emerged as two dominant and relatively independent dimensions. A number of mood scales have been created to measure these factors; however, many existing measures are inadequate, showing low reliability or poor convergent or discriminant validity. To fill the need for reliable and valid Positive Affect and Negative Affect scales that are also brief and easy to administer, we developed two 10-item mood scales that comprise the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). The scales are shown to be highly internally consistent, largely uncorrelated, and stable at appropriate levels over a 2-month time period. Normative data and factorial and external evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for the scales are also presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
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A 4-factor measure of drinking motives based on a conceptual model by M. Cox and E. Klinger (see PA, Vol 75:32975; see also 1990) is presented. Using data from a representative household sample of 1,243 Black and White adolescents, confirmatory factor analyses showed that the hypothesized model provided an excellent fit to the data and that the factor pattern was invariant across gender, race, and age. Each drinking motive was related to a distinct pattern of contextual antecedents and drinking-related outcomes, and these relationships did not generally vary across demographic subgroups. Results support both the conceptual validity of Cox and Klinger's model and the utility of this measure for clinical and research purposes across a diverse range of adolescent populations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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The autonomic nervous system and its sympathetic arm play important roles in the regulation of blood pressure.1–3⇓⇓ Their role in the short-term regulation of blood pressure, especially in responses to transient changes in arterial pressure, via baroreflex mechanisms is well known.4 However, the role of the sympathetic branch in longer-term (days, months, and years) blood pressure regulation has been a focus of debate since at least the 1970s.1,4⇓ Our goal in this Hypertension Highlights is to summarize and integrate our ideas on the role of the sympathetic nervous system in long-term blood pressure regulation in humans.1–3,5–9⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓ We will focus primarily on information from studies conducted in humans and use data from animal studies to emphasize key points. In this context, we want to address 4 key questions. The first 3 focus on our recent work. The final issue is an emerging one and more speculative. First, what is the role of the sympathetic nervous system in long-term blood pressure regulation in young (18- to 40-year–old) normotensive men? Second, does the role of the sympathetic nervous system in long-term blood pressure regulation change as a function of age in men? Third, does sex influence the role of the sympathetic nervous system in long-term blood pressure regulation, and are sex differences modified by aging? Fourth, are we entering an era of sympathetically driven hypertension? Before we address these questions, we share a few thoughts about how to assess the overall activity of sympathetic nerves in humans. Various approaches used to assess sympathetic activity in humans have been reviewed recently by Grassi.10 We focus primarily on studies that use direct measurements of muscle sympathetic nerve activity (MSNA) as an overall marker of sympathetic outflow in humans and, to …
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Individuals with different drinking motives show distinctive patterns of alcohol use and problems. Drinking to cope, or endorsing strong coping motives for alcohol use, has been shown to be particularly hazardous. It is important to determine the unique triggers associated with coping drinking. One limitation of past research has been the failure to contend with the complexities inherent in coping motives. Using the Modified Drinking Motives Questionnaire-Revised (Grant, Stewart, O'Connor, Blackwell, & Conrod, 2007), which separates coping-anxiety and coping-depression motives, we investigated whether these motives moderated relationships between daily mood and subsequent drinking (statistically controlling for sex, baseline anxious and depressive symptomatology, initial alcohol problems, and additional drinking motives). College students (N=146) provided daily reports of mood and alcohol consumption online for 3 weeks. Multilevel modeling analyses revealed that, as hypothesized, stronger initial coping-depression motives predicted higher daily depressed mood-alcohol consumption slopes. Also consistent with expectation, stronger initial coping-anxiety motives predicted higher anxious mood-alcohol consumption slopes. We discuss how this identification of the unique mood triggers associated with each type of coping drinking motive can provide the basis for targeted interventions.
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Longitudinal data were obtained from a nonclinical sample of 1,308 male and female adolescents covering the age range from 12 to 21. Factor analyses of 52 symptoms and/or consequences of alcohol use yielded three problem dimensions. In addition, a unidimensional, 23-item scale (the Rutgers Alcohol Problem Index, RAPI) was constructed with an internal consistency of .92. Correlations between RAPI and alcohol-use intensity were moderately strong for all age groups at each test occasion (ranging from .20 to .57), yet low enough to suggest that identification of problem drinkers requires both types of measures. The results suggest that the RAPI may be a useful tool for the standardized and efficient assessment of problem drinking during adolescence.
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The present study proposed and tested a motivational model of alcohol use in which people are hypothesized to use alcohol to regulate both positive and negative emotions. Two central premises underpin this model: (a) that enhancement and coping motives for alcohol use are proximal determinants of alcohol use and abuse through which the influence of expectancies, emotions, and other individual differences are mediated and (b) that enhancement and coping motives represent phenomenologically distinct behaviors having both unique antecedents and consequences. This model was tested in 2 random samples (1 of adults, 1 of adolescents) using a combination of moderated regression and path analysis corrected for measurement error. Results revealed strong support for the hypothesized model in both samples and indicate the importance of distinguishing psychological motives for alcohol use.
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The 2001 Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study surveyed students at 119 4-year colleges that participated in the 1993, 1997, and 1999 studies. Responses in the 4 survey years were compared to determine trends in heavy alcohol use, alcohol-related problems, and encounters with college and community prevention efforts. In 2001, approximately 2 in 5 (44.4%) college students reported binge drinking, a rate almost identical to rates in the previous 3 surveys. Very little change in overall binge drinking occurred at the individual college level. The percentages of abstainers and frequent binge drinkers increased, a polarization of drinking behavior first noted in 1997. A sharp rise in frequent binge drinking was noted among students attending all-women's colleges. Other significant changes included increases in immoderate drinking and harm among drinkers. More students lived in substance-free housing and encountered college educational efforts and sanctions resulting from their alcohol use.
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Implicit and explicit alcohol-related cognitions were measured in 2 dimensions: positive-negative (valence) and arousal-sedation, with 2 versions of the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. Schwartz) and related explicit measures. Heavy drinkers (n = 24) strongly associated alcohol with arousal on the arousal IAT (especially men) and scored higher on explicit arousal expectancies than light drinkers (n = 24). On the valence IAT, both light and heavy drinkers showed strong negative implicit associations with alcohol that contrasted with their positive explicit judgments (heavy drinkers were more positive). Implicit and explicit cognitions uniquely contributed to the prediction of 1-month prospective drinking. Heavy drinkers' implicit arousal associations could reflect the sensitized psychomotor-activating response to drug cues, a motivational mechanism hypothesized to underlie the etiology of addictive behaviors.
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Integrating data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, national coroner studies, census and college enrollment data for 18-24-year-olds, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, and the Harvard College Alcohol Survey, we calculated the alcohol-related unintentional injury deaths and other health problems among college students ages 18-24 in 1998 and 2001. Among college students ages 18-24 from 1998 to 2001, alcohol-related unintentional injury deaths increased from nearly 1600 to more than 1700, an increase of 6% per college population. The proportion of 18-24-year-old college students who reported driving under the influence of alcohol increased from 26.5% to 31.4%, an increase from 2.3 million students to 2.8 million. During both years more than 500,000 students were unintentionally injured because of drinking and more than 600,000 were hit/assaulted by another drinking student. Greater enforcement of the legal drinking age of 21 and zero tolerance laws, increases in alcohol taxes, and wider implementation of screening and counseling programs and comprehensive community interventions can reduce college drinking and associated harm to students and others.
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Theoretical models of alcohol consumption assert that young adults endorse multiple drinking motives, including drinking to cope with negative experiences and to enhance positive experiences. Social contacts may be important to both pathways. This study applied daily process methodology to determine the relationship between college student drinking in different contexts and daily social contacts and moods. Each afternoon for 3 weeks, 122 undergraduates (43% men, 57% women) logged onto a secure Web site during specified hours to report daily activities, moods, and contacts. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses provided support for motivational models and the context-specific nature of motivated drinking. Individual differences were revealed for each motivation. These findings highlight the importance of studying within-person processes using daily process designs.
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Since there are several popular beliefs about putative health benefits of amusement which are empirically substantiated poorly about putative health benefits of amusement, the immediate cardiovascular effects of amusement were studied in detail. Cardiovascular activity was studied while participants were viewing humorous films, relative to a control condition involving no amusement. High-resolution measures of heart rate, heart rate variability, continuous blood pressure, and respiration were recorded, and the phase synchronization among the variables was analyzed, which provides information on the coordinated behavior of response systems. Viewing humorous films had cardiovascular effects indicating heightened sympathetic arousal, if they elicited intense amusement. No effects were observed for variables indicating parasympathetic input to the heart. The observed effects associated with amusement were not driven by changes in the respiration. The suppression of positive affect expressions did not produce any additional activation. The transient cardiovascular effects of amusement do not correspond to beneficial correlates of a habitual positive affect disposition reported in the literature, demonstrating that it would be erroneous to argue from the long-term effects of a positive affect disposition to the effects of a single amusing event.
Data
This study investigated whether Coping Motivated and Enhancement Motivated drinkers differ in their degree of semantic activation of alcohol concepts on a primed Stroop colour-naming task following exposure to negative and positive affect primes, respectively. Participants were 48 undergraduates (not necessarily problem drinkers) who had elevated scores on the Coping Motivated or Enhancement Motivated subscale of the Drinking Motives Questionnaire - Revised. The Stroop task involved negative, positive and neutral primes that preceded alcohol and no-alcohol target words. As hypothesized, Coping Motivated drinkers showed semantic activation of alcohol concepts following exposure to negative but not neutral primes. Also as hypothesized, Enhancement Motivated drinkers showed semantic activation of alcohol concepts following exposure to positive but not negative primes. Unexpectedly, semantic activation of alcohol concepts was also observed among Coping Motivated drinkers following positive primes and among Enhancement Motivated drinkers following neutral primes. Theoretical implications are discussed, as are implications for improving cognitive behavioral interventions for problem drinkers.
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The 2001 Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study surveyed students at 119 4-year colleges that par-ticipated in the 1993, 1997, and 1999 studies. Responses in the 4 survey years were compared to determine trends in heavy alcohol use, alcohol-related problems, and encounters with college and community prevention efforts. In 2001, approximately 2 in 5 (44.4%) college students reported binge drinking, a rate almost identical to rates in the previous 3 surveys. Very little change in overall binge drinking occurred at the individual college level. The percentages of abstainers and frequent binge drinkers increased, a polarization of drinking behavior first noted in 1997.A sharp rise in frequent binge drinking was noted among students attending all-women's colleges. Other significant changes included increas-es in immoderate drinking and harm among drinkers. More stu-dents lived in substance-free housing and encountered college educational efforts and sanctions resulting from their alcohol use. Key Words: alcohol, alcohol-related problems, binge drinking, college students, secondhand effects of alcohol, prevention
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The purpose of the present study was to place drinking motives within the context of the Five-Factor Model of personality. Specifically, we sought to determine whether certain personality domains and facets of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) predict Enhancement, Coping, Social, and/or Conformity drinking motives from the Revised Drinking Motives Questionnaire (DMQ-R). A sample of 256 university student drinkers (M age =21.3 years) completed the NEO-PI-R and DMQ-R. In bivariate correlations, the two negative reinforcement motives (Coping and Conformity) were positively correlated with Neuroticism and negatively correlated with Extraversion. The two positive reinforcement motives (Enhancement and Social) were positively correlated with Extraversion and negatively correlated with Conscientiousness. Multiple regression analyses revealed that personality domain scores predicted two of the four drinking motives (i.e. the internal drinking motives of Coping and Enhancement), after controlling for the influences of alternative drinking motives. Enhancement Motives were predicted by high Extraversion and low Conscientiousness, and Coping Motives by high Neuroticism. Supplementary correlational analyses involving certain personality facet scores revealed that the depression and self-consciousness facets of the Neuroticism domain were positively correlated with residual Coping and Conformity Motives, respectively, and that the excitement-seeking and gregariousness facets of the Extraversion domain were positively correlated with residual Enhancement and Social Motives, respectively. These results provide further validation of Cox and Klinger’s 2×2 (valence [positive vs negative reinforcement]×source [internal vs external]) model of drinking motivations, and confirm previous speculations that drinking motives are distinguishable on the basis of personality domains and facets. Understanding the relations between personality and drinking motives may prove useful in identifying young drinkers whose drinking motivations may portend the development of heavy and/or problem drinking.
Article
A common concern when faced with multivariate data with missing values is whether the missing data are missing completely at random (MCAR); that is, whether missingness depends on the variables in the data set. One way of assessing this is to compare the means of recorded values of each variable between groups defined by whether other variables in the data set are missing or not. Although informative, this procedure yields potentially many correlated statistics for testing MCAR, resulting in multiple-comparison problems. This article proposes a single global test statistic for MCAR that uses all of the available data. The asymptotic null distribution is given, and the small-sample null distribution is derived for multivariate normal data with a monotone pattern of missing data. The test reduces to a standard t test when the data are bivariate with missing data confined to a single variable. A limited simulation study of empirical sizes for the test applied to normal and nonnormal data suggests that the test is conservative for small samples.
Article
Does evening circadian preference predict university students’ motives for drinking alcohol (i.e. social, enhancement, conformity, or coping motives)? Drinking to cope, which is associated with alcohol problems, may be more common in evening types because of their sleep problems and difficulties in dealing with stress. Two hundred and nineteen university students (M age = 21.80, SD = 6.80) completed online the Composite Scale of Morningness, the Drinking Motives Questionnaire Revised, the Sleep Quality Scale, the COPE measure of coping with stress, a measure of socially desirable responding, and gave information about gender and age. Evening preference was associated with greater use of all drinking motives, and with poorer sleep and poorer coping with stress. Multiple regression showed that drinking to cope was best predicted by poor sleep, social drinking, and avoidant coping with stress (R 2 = 0.45). Poor sleep and drinking to cope are a cause for concern because of possible reciprocal causality.
Article
Electronic computers facilitate greatly carrying out factor analysis. Computers will help in solving the communality problem and the question of the number of factors as well as the question of arbitrary factoring and the problem of rotation. "Cloacal short-cuts will not be necessary and the powerful methods of Guttman will be feasible." A library of programs essential for factor analysis is described, and the use of medium sized computers as the IBM 650 deprecated for factor analysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Article
discuss several promises as well as potential problems with the circumplex model of emotion / while this model promises to organize much of what we know about emotion, it is nevertheless open to misinterpretation / before detailing these particular strengths and weaknesses, we begin by describing how a circumplex model is applied in the emotion domain / by advocating the circumplex model, a claim is made that the majority of emotional experience can be captured by two affect dimensions [positive affect and negative affect] despite the promise a circumplex model holds for aiding our understanding of emotion, a number of problems need to be understood / one set of problems relates to specific interpretational issues concerning the emotion circumplex: are there basic dimensions in the circumplex and how should the dimensions be named / the second set of problems is broader: what does the circumplex fail to do in describing and explaining the relationships between emotions, and what are the shortcomings of the extant data / we will consider first the interpretational issues and, after that, the broader issues (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Article
The 42-item version of the Inventory of Drinking Situations (IDS-42) assesses relative frequency of drinking behavior across eight categories of drinking situations and was originally developed as a method for identifying high-risk situations in alcoholic samples. This study was designed to examine the psychometric properties of the IDS-42 in a sample of university students in order to assess its suitability as an assessment tool in the non-clinical population. Three hundred and ninety-six students (111 M, 283 F, 2 with missing gender data) completed the IDS-42 and a well established measure of drinking motives, the Drinking Motives Questionnaire (DMQ). Confirmatory factor analysis of the IDS-42 established a hierarchical factor structure with eight lower-order factors and three higher-order factors of negatively-reinforcing situations, positively-reinforcing situations, and temptation situations. The eight lower-order IDS-42 factors demonstrated moderate to high internal consistency and excellent concurrent validity with conceptually-similar DMQ subscale scores. Non-parametric analyses revealed that male students reported a higher drinking frequency overall as compared to female students, particularly in IDS-42 situations involving Social Pressure to Drink, Pleasant Times with Others, Testing Personal Control, and Urges and Temptations. Across the entire sample of university student drinkers, a higher drinking frequency was reported in positively-reinforcing situations as compared to negatively-reinforcing situations and temptation situations, as predicted. Results suggest the IDS-42 possesses good psychometric properties and support its utility as a tool in identifying situation-specific antecedents to drinking among university students.
Article
Most evidence on the motives-alcohol use link has come from cross-sectional research using retrospective assessments. It remains also to be demonstrated whether motives predict drinking in particular circumstances. In the present study, drinking motives assessed 2 weeks prior to a diary study were used to predict the number of drinks on weekend days as reported via short message service (SMS). Multilevel regression models were estimated based on 391 reports from 55 participants (mean age 22.7). The results revealed that enhancement motives but not gender, age, or social, coping, or conformity motives predicted weekend drinking over and above usual consumption. Consumption and motives together explained more than three-quarters of the inter-individual variance in weekend drinking. To conclude, this study points to a heavy episodic weekend drinking culture of young people who drink large quantities on Friday and Saturday nights apparently because they are seeking fun and excitement. Preventive measures should aim to counteract young people's drinking at peak times and in high-risk situations.
Article
Findings from previous prospective research suggest the association between alcohol use and undergraduate academic performance is negligible. This study was designed to address weaknesses of the past research by relying on objective measures of both drinking and academic performance. A prospective study was conducted with repeated measures of exposure to alcohol linked to institutional academic records. Alcohol data were collected in residence halls at a nonselective, midwestern, public university in the United States. A total of 659 first- and second-year undergraduate students were tracked over the course of 15-week semesters. A statistically significant negative association with semester academic performance was found for different alcohol indicators: frequency of breath alcohol concentration (BrAC) above .08, mean BrAC, standard deviation, and maximum BrAC recorded. These associations remained statistically significant when controlled for sociodemographic variables and individual level confounders, but the effect sizes were relatively small with a contribution to explained variance of less than 1%. When additionally adjusted for residence hall building, all alcohol indicators no longer reached statistical significance (p > or = .05). Consistent with past prospective research, the magnitude of the association between undergraduate alcohol use and academic performance is small when the effects of high school academic aptitude and performance are accounted for in multivariable analyses. This is the first study to find that living environment may have a robust effect on the academic achievement of undergraduates. Future research should examine more closely the relation between residence and academic performance and the role that alcohol use may play in creating residential environments.
Article
This report estimates the numbers of 18-24 year old United States college students who annually experience alcohol-related deaths, injuries and other health problems. We examined traffic and unintentional injury deaths in 1998 reported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). We also examined results of national coroner studies, Department of Education college enrollment data, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA), the CDC National College Health Risk Behavior Survey and the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Survey (CAS). All survey participants were ages 18-24: 6,930 college and 12,394 noncollege respondents in the NHSDA survey; 3,077 college students in the CDC survey; and 12,217 full-time 4-year college students in the CAS. Based on the number and proportion of 18-24 year olds enrolled in college, data on alcohol involvement in injury deaths among 18-24 year olds and survey responses, we calculated the numbers of 18-24 year old alcohol-related injury deaths and other health problems. We estimate that over 1,400 students aged 18-24 and enrolled in 2- and 4-year colleges died in 1998 from alcohol-related unintentional injuries, including motor vehicle crashes. According to surveys conducted in 1999, in the preceding year, over 2 million of the 8 million college students in the United States drove under the influence of alcohol and over 3 million rode with a drinking driver. Over 500,000 full-time 4-year college students were unintentionally injured under the influence of alcohol and over 600,000 were hit or assaulted by another student who had been drinking. There is an urgent need for expanding prevention and treatment programs, to reduce alcohol-related harm among U.S. college students and other young adults.
Article
The purpose of this research was to evaluate drinking rates as a function of age and gender and to disseminate current estimates of U.S. population drinking norms based on age and gender. Participants included 42,706 men and women 18 years and older who provided information about their drinking from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions [National Alcohol Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC, 2001) dataset collected between 2001 and 2002 from a representative, non-institutionalized sample. Results revealed greater frequency and typical quantity of alcohol consumption among men versus women. Age differences in drinking frequency suggests a sharp increase with legal drinking age followed by a period of reduced frequency, in turn followed by gradual increase up to retirement age. Age differences in typical drinking quantity suggest a sharp increase with legal drinking age followed by a gradual linear decline in number of drinks per occasion. Age differences in typical quantity were more pronounced among men. Analyses provide epidemiological trends in drinking rates by age and gender, and emphasize the importance of within group differences when examining drinking rates. Discussion focuses on explaining how to incorporate norms information in prevention and treatment.
Article
Heavy college-student alcohol use and its resulting negative consequences represent a public-health problem on American college campuses. The Rutgers Alcohol Problem Index (RAPI) is a commonly used measure of alcohol problems among college students, but the psychometric properties of this measure never have been comprehensively assessed with the college-student population. The purpose of this research was to conduct reliability and validity analyses, particularly exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, on a dichotomously scored version of the measure. Data were collected on 4,686 undergraduate students at a large, public university in the Northwest region of the United States and 438 students at a large, public university in the Northeast. Exploratory factor analysis suggested that a three-factor model provided the best fit to the data. This finding was replicated via confirmatory factor analyses in two separate samples. The three factors were labeled Abuse/Dependence Symptoms, Personal Consequences, and Social Consequences. Each individual factor demonstrated adequate internal consistency and convergent validity. The results of this study suggest that a dichotomously scored RAPI consists of three subfactors that are reliable and valid in identifying alcohol-related problems among college students.
Article
The psychometric properties of the Modified Drinking Motives Questionnaire--Revised (Modified DMQ-R) [Blackwell, E., & Conrod, P. J. (2003). A five-dimensional measure of drinking motives. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia], based on a five-factor model of drinking motives with separate coping-anxiety and coping-depression factors, were evaluated in undergraduates. In Study 1, confirmatory factor analyses supported the correlated five-factor model in two samples of undergraduate drinkers (N=726 and N=603). Furthermore, the five-factor model fit the data better than a four-factor model conceptually equivalent to that of Cooper [Cooper, M. L. (1994). Motivations for alcohol use among adolescents: Development and validation of a four-factor model. Psychological Assessment, 6, 117-128] (i.e., with coping-anxiety and coping-depression items constrained to a single factor). In Study 1, drinking motives were predictive of concurrent drinking frequency and typical number of alcoholic beverages per occasion, over and above demographics. In Study 2, the Modified DMQ-R scores showed good to excellent test-retest reliability in a sample of undergraduates who were relatively frequent drinkers (N=169). Also, drinking motives prospectively predicted number of drinks consumed per week and alcohol-related problems, over and above demographics and initial alcohol use. Notably, coping-anxiety and coping-depression motives were distinctly related to alcohol consumption and alcohol problems.
Article
Background: Alcohol produces biphasic effects of both stimulation and sedation. Sensitivity to these effects may increase the risk for the development of alcoholism. Alcohol-induced changes in stimulation and sedation are commonly assessed with self-report questionnaires in human research and with physical activity monitoring in animal research. However, little is known about the effects of alcohol on physical activity or the relationship between physical activity and subjective self-report measures of stimulation and sedation following alcohol consumption in humans. Methods: Thirty healthy men and women (n = 15 each) from 21 to 38 years old completed daily measurements of physical activity and self-reports of stimulation and sedation following alcohol or placebo consumption. Across each of the four experimental days, all participants consumed a placebo, 0.4, 0.6, or 0.8 g/kg dose of 95% alcohol in a counterbalanced order. Breath alcohol concentrations, physical activity levels, and self-reported stimulation and sedation were measured at baseline and on the ascending and descending limbs of the breath alcohol concentration (BrAC) curve. Results: All alcohol doses increased physical activity, but these increases were time- and dose-dependent. Increases in physical activity lasted across both ascending and descending limbs of the BrAC curve. Following the 0.6 g/kg dose, both physical activity and self-reported stimulation increased during the ascending BrAC. Separate analyses of self-reported sedation scores indicated that alcohol consumption also increased sedation for the 0.6 and 0.8 g/kg doses. Physical activity was not significantly correlated with either self-reported stimulation or sedation at any time point. Conclusions: These findings suggest that assessments of subjectively measured stimulation and sedation and objectively measured physical activity each assess unique aspects of the effects of alcohol. Used simultaneously, these measures may be useful for examining underlying mechanisms of the effects of alcohol on behavior.
Article
In two experiments, we investigated whether different mood states activate specific types of implicit alcohol cognition among undergraduates classified as enhancement (EM) or coping (CM) motivated drinkers. Participants completed a Stroop task in Experiment 1 (n=81), and an Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST; [De Houwer, J. (2003). The Extrinsic Affective Simon Task. Experimental Psychology, 50, 77-85.]) in Experiment 2 (n=79) following random assignment to listen to positive or negative musical mood induction procedures (MMIP). Consistent with hypotheses, only EM, and not CM, drinkers displayed an activation of implicit attention to alcohol cues (Experiment 1) and reward-alcohol implicit associations (Experiment 2) following exposure to positive MMIP. Contrary to hypotheses for CM drinkers, none of the groups, in either experiment, showed an activation of implicit alcohol processing following exposure to negative MMIP. Confidence that positive mood activates implicit alcohol cognition among EM drinkers is increased since this result emerged across two studies involving quite different methodologies. This research has implications for experimental cognitive research and it highlights the potential utility of treatment matching according to drinking motives (e.g., EM) to improve clinical outcomes.
Article
21. Goldman M. S., Darkes J. Alcohol expectancy multiaxial assessment: A memory network-based approach. Psychological Assessment 2004; 16: 4–15View all references argued that all three basic alcohol-expectancy factors can be assessed with a brief questionnaire (AEMax), related to the circumplex model of emotion. I argue that negative reinforcement, one of the three basic expectancy factors, is not assessed with the AEMax. Importantly, negative reinforcement is positively related to problem drinking while sedation (the AEMax-factor that comes closest) is not. In a new dataset (from 119 students, collected in 2002), I demonstrate that sedation is related to negative expectancies and not to negative reinforcement. Different ways to assess all major expectancy factors are proposed.
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