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.

The authors explored a multidimensional view of drinking, whereby social and solitary drinking represent distinct behaviors associated with positive and negative experiences, respectively. Using daily diary methodology and multilevel analytic strategy, the authors examined, over 30 days, the within-person association of negative and positive experiences and alcohol consumption in different contexts and focused on interpersonal experiences. On days with more negative interpersonal experiences, participants engaged in more solitary drinking (i.e., drinking at home and alone), whereas on days with more positive interpersonal experiences they drank more in social contexts. The authors also demonstrated that individuals high on neuroticism drank more in solitary contexts on days with more negative interpersonal experiences, relative to those with lower neuroticism. These findings lend support to models linking daily drinking motivation and context-dependent drinking behavior.

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.

The authors investigate the relative importance of actor and interaction partner as determinants of dyadic behavior. Using the social relations model (D. A. Kenny, 1994a; D. A. Kenny & L. La Voie, 1984), the authors estimate the variance attributable to each determinant plus the reciprocity of behavioral responses from 7 studies. The authors find evidence for moderate behavioral consistency in a person's behavior across interaction partners, little or no evidence that people consistently engender the same behavioral response from others, and preliminary evidence of unique responding to particular partners. They also consider several methodological issues concerning behavioral measurement as well as the implications of the results for the study of accuracy.

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