Mood and alcohol consumption: An experience sampling test of the self-medication hypothesis.

Abstract

In this investigation the authors applied the experience sampling method to prospectively test the self-medication hypothesis. In vivo reports gathered in the context of daily life demonstrated that nervousness was the only negative mood state to predict increases in alcohol consumption later in the course of the day. Further examination of this within-person relationship demonstrated that men were more likely to consume alcohol when nervous than were women, but this association was unrelated to family history of alcoholism, problem drinking patterns, or trait anxiety and depression. Consistent with the self-medication hypothesis, cross-sectional analyses also confirmed that alcohol consumption was generally associated with lower levels of nervousness; this effect varied by several demographic and clinical variables. These findings are discussed in terms of the diversity of reasons for alcohol consumption and their potential for explaining problem drinking.

Prevalence and Mental Health Correlates of Harassment and Discrimination in the Workplace

“…For example, women experience SH at higher levels than men (Magley et al, 1999) and are more likely to experience GWH, particularly chronic GWH (Bjorkqvist et al, 1994;Rospenda et al, 2000). Research demonstrates that women are more likely to exhibit depression in response to stressors (Aneshensel, Rutter, & Lachenbruch, 1991), while men are more likely to exhibit alcohol use (Swendsen et al, 2000), but composite measures of SH and GWH have been similarly linked to increased alcohol use and abuse (Richman et al, 1996;Richman et al, 1999) and mental health (Richman et al, 1999) for both genders. By contrast, a recent meta analysis demonstrated that GWH more strongly affected women's job satisfaction (a workplace outcome linked to workers' mental health) (Lapierre, Spector, & Leck, 2005).…”

Associations between emotional distress and heavy drinking among young people: A longitudinal study

“…The self-medication hypothesis has been invoked as a possible causal explanation for the high comorbidity of mental illness and pathological drinking, and for associations between subclinical forms of such problems [22][23][24]. Indeed, there is ample evidence that negative affectivity is linked to self-medication motives for using alcohol [25][26][27], which in turn are predictive of heavy and harmful drinking [28][29][30][31].…”

Modeling Complexity of EMA Data: Time-Varying Lagged Effects of Negative Affect on Smoking Urges for Subgroups of Nicotine Addiction

“…Such sampling approaches introduce a considerable amount of variation in timing between neighboring assessments. Because most current analytical approaches estimate a lagged relationship as a single numerical value, researchers select concurrent assessments (e.g., Shiffman et al, 2002;Shiffman & Waters, 2004), identify observations that fall within a window of interest (e.g., a 2-hr lag; Berkman et al, 2011), or make an assumption that effects of observations collected within a specified time frame (e.g., within 1 hr prior to an event of interest; Swendsen et al, 2000) are constant. These assumptions are rather stringent and may lead to loss of statistical power due to data reduction and a possible bias in the effect estimation due to mixing data collected at different time lags.…”