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Etiological models of problematic alcohol consumption among Francophone college students: Personality, Temporality and Motivation
Abstract and Figures
Introduction: In the interest of positively impacting alcohol consumption among college students, we studied determinants of consumption behaviors within an etiological framework. Personality traits would be associated with alcohol consumption, but the association would be mediated by other more proximal variables. Drinking motives are theorized to be the most proximal predictive factor of alcohol consumption through which all other distal factors exert their influence. There has been a recent spark of interest in “time perspective” meaning the organization of experience into temporal frames (past, present, future). Some have theorized that time perspectives would stem from personality traits, whereas others theorized that time perspective would give rise to motivated behavior. As time perspective has been viewed as a situational-dispositional construct, we advanced the hypothesis they would be etiologically situated between personality and motivation. Methods: Students living in France or in Québec were administered questionnaires online. Measures included Big 5 personality, time perspective, temporal competency, drinking motives and problematic alcohol consumption. Our main aim was to draw up multiple parallel mediator models reflecting different etiological relationships. In study 1, personality traits led to alcohol use through drinking motives. In study 2, personality traits led to alcohol consumption through temporalities. In study 3, temporalities led to drinking behaviors through drinking motives. In study 4, these results were taken collectively in order to derive and test hypotheses relating serial mediation (personality, temporality, drinking motives, alcohol consumption).
Results: Cultural differences were identified in study 1. French students drank alcohol in larger quantities than those in Canada, but Canadians drank with a higher frequency. Canadians scored higher on openness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and extraversion in comparison to the French, whereas the French scored higher on specific drinking motives (coping-depression, 6 conformity, social). There were indirect effects of personality traits on alcohol consumption through drinking motives. Every motive, except coping-anxiety, was identified as a significant mediator, and all traits led to alcohol consumption in part through drinking motives. In study 2 we used regressions to identify temporalities that were best associated with drinking behaviors: anticipation, temporal rupture, past negative and present hedonist. We explored their relationships with personality traits and confirmed our hypothesis that traits would lead to alcohol consumption through specific temporalities. In the third study, specific drinking motives explained the relationship between temporalities and alcohol consumption. The fourth study compiled positive results from studies 1-3 in a result matrix that was then used to generate a hypothesis matrix about serial mediational relationships. We found that nearly all hypotheses grounded in sufficient logical assumptions were true. We also proposed hypotheses that implied that we must take into account the full serial chain in order for a part of the chain to yield positive results and found that 40% of such relationships were significant. Discussion: Understanding specific etiological pathways leading up to problematic alcohol consumption could aide practitioners and policy makers to positively impact drinking behaviors among students in Canada or in France. We found that the reasons why people drink alcohol best explained drinking behaviors. Personality traits would be related to alcohol consumption but mostly just because they led to drinking motives. However, before personality traits develop into drinking motives, they would give rise to specific temporalities. As our study advanced the existent literature on the processes leading up to drinking behaviors, we may be able to better foresee among which students problems will develop and prevent the onset or the aggravation of problematic alcohol use through emerging adulthood.
Key words : alcohol, student, France, Québec, personality, temporality, drinking motives, mediation
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... This is indicative of a generally troubled sense of time in people who focus negatively on the past (Wittmann et al., 2015). Individuals who have unhealthy alcohol-drinking habits are not only more likely to be present hedonists but also produce higher values on the past-negative orientation scale (Loose, 2017). Since the subjective passage of time is related to mood disorders and is altered in several groups of psychiatric patients, we expected the felt passage of time to be most likely impaired in patients with BPD. ...
... Preoccupation with a specific time frame or the lack of attention to a time frame appears to be related to a diminished ability to function adaptively. Studies show how psychological well-being and behavioural functioning are related to the time perspective (Boniwell et al., 2010;Loose, 2017;Mueller et al., 2014;Rönnlund et al., 2017;Zhang et al., 2013). Regarding psychiatric issues, patients with anxiety disorders have a pronounced bias towards a negative past and the negative future, which are related to worry and rumination, respectively (Åström et al., 2018). ...
Patients with borderline personality disorders (BPD) show heightened negative affect and maladaptive emotion-regulation strategies. An individual's time perspective towards the past, present, and
future as well as the feeling of time passage are strongly related to affect and emotion regulation.
We therefore assessed the time perspective (Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, ZTPI) and the
subjective passage of time for present and past time intervals (Subjective Time Questionnaire, STQ)
in 17 patients with BPD between the ages of 18 and 52 and 17 control subjects matched for gender,
age and education. Patients with BPD show deviations in nearly all time orientations in the ZTPI:
lower scores in the future and the past-positive dimension and higher scores in the present-fatalistic
and past-negative dimensions. Patients deviate significantly more than controls from a balanced
time perspective (BTP). Regarding the STQ, patients with BPD feel a general expansion of time at
present but not for past intervals. Taken together, we show how BPD can be understood as a strong
imbalance in individual time orientations and a most likely negatively felt expansion of subjective
time in daily life.
... Also, we have not looked into associations between TCT-5D scales and different behaviors such as wellbeing, substance use, academic achievement etc. Exploring associations between personality traits and TCT-5D scales may be an interesting avenue and could allow us to investigate if we are simply describing personality traits under a different label. Another hypothesis could be that our temporality scales mediate the relationship between traits and behaviors, as did time perspectives (Loose, 2017). Lastly it would be interesting to translate the questionnaire into other languages in order to explore its extension into other cultural contexts. ...
We developed and validated a new version of our test of temporal competency. In three studies we (1) defined dimensions, created items and studied face and content validity; (2) examined dimensionality and reliability; and (3) confirmed factor structure and studied convergent validity. Focus groups were held in which we drew up temporal concepts that articulated well with clinical observations. We derived a questionnaire that was administered to French young people and this data was used to reduce the questionnaire to 15 items. Reliability and validity of the 15-item version was studied among samples: French college, French high school, and Québec college. Five dimensions were defined and retained: anticipation, full present, temporal rupture, past, future. 15 items explained 68% of variance. The model provided adequate fit in confirmatory analyses across samples. Scales converged with hypothesized dimensions of the ZTPI and scales mostly maintained acceptable reliability. Conceptual issues with ZTPI were addressed, possibly rectified and discussed in light of clinical practice. The past was defined by how much one grows from experience independently of how ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ events were. Full present and temporal rupture relate to living in the now, the first by means of flow and engagement, the second by means of addictive behaviors. Future entailed a projection unto uncertainty, whereas anticipation defined adapting behavior in order to achieve short-term goals. We found that the questionnaire had adequate psychometric proprieties among Francophone youth in Canada and in France.
Review of research on spirit possession, OBEs, and related experiences
The importance of the future as an arena for planning, self-regulation and achievement has been of considerable interest in past research. The majority of this research suggests that future-oriented thinking has considerable benefits for psychological adjustment and wellbeing. The future is nevertheless not only a temporal space for goal-setting and positive expectations, it may also be associated with fear, uncertainty and anxiety, which may ultimately have detrimental effects on both mental and physical health. Here we present the outline for the Swedish ZTPI (S-ZTPI) which extends the original ZTPI by separating the Future dimension into two sub-factors: The Future Positive scale and the Future Negative scale. We argue that separating the future into two separate dimensions thus comprehending both a positive and a negative valence of the future, adds important information regarding association between future time perspective and subjective well-being.
Certain people are at risk for using alcohol or other drugs excessively and for developing problems with their use. Their susceptibility might arise from a variety of factors, including their genetic make-up, brain chemistry, family background, personality and other psychological variables, and environmental and sociocultural variables. Moreover, after substance use has become established, there are additional cognitive-motivational variables (e.g., substance-related attentional bias) that contribute to enacting behaviors consistent with the person's motivation to acquire and use the substance. People who are at such risk are likely to choose to use addictive substances even though doing so entails negative consequences. In the sense of complete freedom from being determined by causal factors, we believe that there is no such thing as free will, but defined as ability to make choices from among multiple options, even though the choices are ultimately governed by natural processes, addicted individuals are free to choose. Although they might appear unable to exercise this kind of free will in decisions about their substance use, addictive behaviors are ultimately always goal-directed and voluntary. Such goal pursuits manifest considerable flexibility. Even some severely addicted individuals can cease their use when the value of continuing the use abruptly declines or when the subjective cost of continuing the use is too great with respect to the incentives in other areas of their lives. Formal treatment strategies (e.g., contingency management, Systematic Motivational Counseling, cognitive training) can also be used to facilitate this reversal.
This chapter focuses on social and cultural aspects of time. It examines the diversity of ways that people from different cultures measure, use and conceive time and some of the consequences of these different ways of thinking and behaving. It describes the author’s field experiments that have measured the pace of life in cities across the United States and around the world. These studies speak to the diversity of peoples’ time sense and the consequences of temporal norms for the physical, social and psychological well-being of the people who share these norms. The chapter pays tribute to Zimbardo’s work on time perspective. It argues that the two approaches—Zimbardo’s focus on the individual and the author’s focus on places—complement each other in the best tradition of social psychology.
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will transform modern life by reshaping transportation, health, science, finance, and the military. To adapt public policy, we need to better anticipate these advances. Here we report the results from a large survey of machine learning researchers on their beliefs about progress in AI. Researchers predict AI will outperform humans in many activities in the next ten years, such as translating languages (by 2024), writing high-school essays (by 2026), driving a truck (by 2027), working in retail (by 2031), writing a bestselling book (by 2049), and working as a surgeon (by 2053). Researchers believe there is a 50% chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years, with Asian respondents expecting these dates much sooner than North Americans. These results will inform discussion amongst researchers and policymakers about anticipating and managing trends in AI. This article is part of the special track on AI and Society.
Contexte : des études suggèrent que la temporalité est un déterminant important de l’usage des substances psychoactives. Cette étude vise à établir les propriétés psychométriques de deux mesures de temporalité et à les comparer. Ces deux mesures sont ensuite mises en lien avec des comportements potentiellement addictifs : usage de l’alcool, du tabac, du cannabis et d’internet. Nous visons à étudier des différences développementales par une comparaison entre les lycéens et les étudiants. Méthodes : après avoir donné leur consentement, des lycéens (n = 256) et des étudiants (n = 263) français ont rempli un ensemble d’auto-questionnaires. Résultats : les mesures de temporalité sont partiellement validées. Les deux mesures sont corrélées significativement à plusieurs comportements à risque addictif. Discussion : en pratique clinique, ces résultats contribuent à étayer les associations entre le rapport au temps et les comportements à risque addictif. Cela peut contribuer au développement d’une nouvelle modalité d’intervention auprès des usagers lors des actions de prévention ou de soin.
Résumé
La qualité de vie subjective des patients diabétiques peut être déterminée par une interaction des facteurs biologiques, sociaux et psychologiques. Cette conception de l’individu est reconnue dans la pratique clinique, mais peu de travaux ont étudié ses bénéfices de manière quantitative. Dans une approche locale, on examine l’influence de chaque facteur sur la qualité de vie. À l’inverse, dans une approche Bio-Psycho-Sociale ou globale, la qualité de vie est appréhendée au regard de l’interaction de ces différents facteurs. L’étude a inclus 28 patients diabétiques hospitalisés. Pour la qualité de vie, l’évaluation a été réalisée avec l’échelle SF-36. Pour les facteurs qui influencent la qualité de vie, l’outil INTERMED a été utilisé. Il a été démontré que chaque facteur est associé de manière négative, et statistiquement significative, à la qualité de vie subjective. De plus, l’interaction des facteurs permet de mieux expliquer cette qualité de vie que la simple prise en compte de n’importe quel facteur pris isolément. Ces résultats soulignent la nécessité de prendre en charge les éléments psychosociaux auprès des patients afin d’assurer au mieux le vécu subjectif de leur état de santé.
Introduction:
Numerous studies suggest that social, enhancement, conformity and coping drinking motives each lead to unique behavioral patterns related to alcohol consumption. Recently it has been suggested to study specific coping motives that distinguish feelings of anxiety and depression. This study aims primarily to 1) psychometrically validate the recent five factor questionnaire of drinking motives among young French people, 2) explore differences in mean endorsements of motives across age and sex and 3) explore the concurrent validity of drinking motives by studying their associations with alcohol consumption behaviors.
Methods:
The French Modified Drinking Motives Questionnaire Revised and the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test were administered to 314 university students and 193 high school students.
Results:
The 5-factor model of drinking motives provided a good fit to the data and a better fit than the 4-factor model. Conformity motives were more strongly endorsed among high school students than among university students (d=0.26). Social motives were more endorsed by men than by women (d=0.47), as were enhancement motives (d=0.48). Our study suggests that each of the studied motives transcribes a specific set of drinking behaviors.
Conclusions:
Researchers and practitioners could effectively use this conception of drinking motives in order to better understand and prevent problematic alcohol use among young people.
Background: Scores on temporal psychology measures continue to be associated with alcohol-related problems; however, few studies have examined these associations using more than one temporal psychology instrument. This omission is potentially problematic as not all instruments measure the same dimensions of temporal psychology. The present study aimed to address this gap in the literature.
Methods: Participants (N = 410) were opportunistically sampled from a University in the United Kingdom and completed the following questionnaires: The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test; The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale; The Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory; The Temporal Focus Scale; The Adolescent Time Inventory-Time Attitudes Scale; and The Consideration of Future Consequences Scale-14.
Results: Results showed weak to moderate correlations (with one exception, CFC-F and ZTPI-F) between scores on the various temporal scales, indicating that they measure related but distinct constructs. Structural equation modelling and linear regression revealed that AUDIT scores were most strongly associated with present hedonism, symptoms of anxiety were most strongly associated with negative feelings about the present, and symptoms of depression were more moderately associated with a broader range of indicators.
Conclusions: Cognitive and affective dimensions of temporal psychology relate differently to different health outcomes, and researchers need to be explicit and clear in reporting findings.
There have been numerous treatments in the clinical research literature about various design, analysis, and interpretation considerations when testing hypotheses about mechanisms and contingencies of effects, popularly known as mediation and moderation analysis. In this paper we address the practice of mediation and moderation analysis using linear regression in the pages of Behaviour Research and Therapy and offer some observations and recommendations, debunk some popular myths, describe some new advances, and provide an example of mediation, moderation, and their integration as conditional process analysis using the PROCESS macro for SPSS and SAS. Our goal is to nudge clinical researchers away from historically significant but increasingly old school approaches toward modifications, revisions, and extensions that characterize more modern thinking about the analysis of the mechanisms and contingencies of effects.