Affect and alcohol consumption: An ecological momentary assessment study during national lockdown.

Abstract

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.

Associations of state and trait empathy with daily alcohol use

“…Although this study allowed us to examine state empathy and daily alcohol use in a large sample of social drinkers, and while sample type generally did not moderate any of the findings reported here, future studies should replicate these findings in a more homogenous sample. Fourth, while the 7 to 10-day EMA periods used in these studies are commonly used EMA timeframes in alcohol research (e.g., Tovmasyan, Monk, Qureshi, et al, 2022 ), we were unlikely to capture more than a few drinking episodes per participant in these non–daily drinkers. Future EMA studies should be longer and/or be conducted over multiple weekends to capture more drinking episodes.…”

Zero inflation in intensive longitudinal data: why is it important and how should we deal with it?

“…Count data are common in EMA studies where participants report the frequency of events that occur throughout the day, such as the frequency of experienced emotions (Tong et al, 2007), number of alcoholic beverages (Courtney & Russell, 2021;Tovmasyan, Monk, Qureshi, Bunting, & Heim, 2023), or number of cigarettes (Lipperman-Kreda et al, 2020). To address non-normality in the count outcomes, or events sampled outcomes, the Poisson distribution is a common choice (Courtney & Russell, 2021;Tong et al, 2007).…”

Temporal relations between alcohol use, posttraumatic stress disorder, and internalizing symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic: An ecological momentary assessment investigation.

“…EMA studies examining both the self-medication hypothesis and the susceptibility hypothesis are critically important to model these two, nonmutually exclusive pathways of risk and subsequently understand the temporal relations between alcohol use and PTSD symptoms in real time. In addition to testing both pathways of risk, there is a need to test for specificity of these pathways to PTSD and alcohol consumption given the inconsistent support for either hypothesis across disorders and that existing EMA work has also demonstrated relationships between negative affect, more broadly, and alcohol consumption (Epler et al, 2014; Tovmasyan et al, 2023).…”