No evidence for trait- and state-level urgency moderating the daily association between negative affect and subsequent alcohol use in two college samples

Abstract

It remains unclear whether the negative reinforcement pathway to problematic drinking exists, and if so, for whom. One idea that has received some support recently is that people who tend to act impulsively in response to negative emotions (i.e. people high in negative urgency) may specifically respond to negative affect with increased alcohol consumption. We tested this idea in a preregistered secondary data analysis of two ecological momentary assessment studies using college samples. Participants ( N = 226) reported on their current affective state multiple times per day and also the following morning reported alcohol use of the previous night. We assessed urgency both at baseline and during the momentary affect assessments. Results from our Bayesian model comparison procedure, which penalises increasing model complexity, indicate that no combination of the variables of interest (negative affect, urgency, and the respective interactions) outperformed a baseline model that included two known demographic predictors of alcohol use. A non-preregistered exploratory analysis provided some evidence for the effect of daily positive affect, positive urgency, as well as their interaction on subsequent alcohol use. Taken together, our results suggest that college students’ drinking may be better described by a positive rather than negative reinforcement cycle.

Exploring associations between affect and marijuana use in everyday life via specification curve analysis.

“…Participants reported consuming marijuana on 20.4% of study days. Consistent with prior EMA work (Dora, Piccirillo, et al, 2022;Dora, Schultz, et al, 2022;Trampe et al, 2015;Zelenski & Larsen, 2000), participants reported relatively low levels of momentary negative affect (M = 17.62, SD = 14.92) and moderate levels of momentary positive affect (M = 50.00, SD = 22.27) on average.…”

“…A recent large-scale meta-analysis (Dora, Piccirillo, et al, 2022; Dora, Schultz, et al, 2022) of this literature, which included a large number of college student samples, found that people were more likely to drink on days that they reported higher positive affect (the daily association between negative affect and alcohol use, on the other hand, was estimated to be close to zero). As such, we are inclined to interpret this result as another piece of evidence that, specifically in college student samples (Dora, Piccirillo, et al, 2022; Dora, Schultz, et al, 2022; Wycoff et al, 2018), people's substance use (alcohol and marijuana) tends to be preceded by positive (rather than negative) emotional experiences. Our specification curve analysis shows further that the discrete emotions one assesses might matter also when it comes to positive affect (we found no effects for friendly and engaged ).…”

“…This may be especially problematic when such measures are designed to primarily capture high arousal affect items, such as in the positive and negative affect schedule (PANAS) (Watson et al, 1988). A recent study of affective models of alcohol use in EMA data (Dora, Piccirillo, et al, 2022; Dora, Schultz, et al, 2022) reported that the vast majority of studies relied on PANAS or PANAS-like measures, meaning that there is substantially less information about how low arousal emotions, such as sadness or serenity, are related to substance use. Instead, future work should examine associations across a variety of discrete emotions or at least across more specific affective states as proposed in the PANAS-X (Watson & Clark, 1994).…”

“…For one of our specification clusters, we tested whether controlling for variables that are commonly associated with substance use in the EMA literature (age, sex, marijuana use motives, impulsivity; Bonar et al, 2017; Dora, Piccirillo, et al, 2022; Dora, Schultz, et al, 2022; Linden-Carmichael et al, 2021; Simons et al, 2010) would impact our results. Age: Participants reported their age in years.Sex: Participants reported their biological sex assigned at birth (1 = female, 2 = male).…”

Modeling the value-based decision to consume alcohol in response to emotional experiences.

“…Next, given that recent research indicates that drinking in everyday life often seems to follow high positive affect (Dora, Kuczynski, et al, 2022; Dora, Schultz, et al, 2022), we repeated our analyses comparing the positive to the neutral mood induction. Unsurprisingly (given the small effect of the positive induction on mood), these models provided no evidence for an Induction × Sample interaction on drift rate and boundary separation associated with alcohol (BF 01 [drift rate] = 5.63, BF 01 [boundary separation] = 19.55) and food (BF 01 [drift rate] = 1.49, BF 10 [boundary separation] = 2.12), with Bayes factors ranging from strong evidence against our hypothesis to inconclusive.…”