The daily association between affect and alcohol use: A meta-analysis of individual participant data.

Abstract

Influential psychological theories hypothesize that people consume alcohol in response to the experience of both negative and positive emotions. Despite two decades of daily diary and ecological momentary assessment research, it remains unclear whether people consume more alcohol on days they experience higher negative and positive affects in everyday life. In this preregistered meta-analysis, we synthesized the evidence for these daily associations between affect and alcohol use. We included individual participant data from 69 studies (N = 12,394), which used daily and momentary surveys to assess the affect and the number of alcoholic drinks consumed. Results indicate that people are not more likely to drink on days they experience high negative affect but are more likely to drink and drink heavily on days high in positive affect. People self-reporting a motivational tendency to drink-to-cope and drink-to-enhance consumed more alcohol but not on days they experienced higher negative and positive affects. Results were robust across different operationalizations of affect, study designs, study populations, and individual characteristics. These findings challenge the long-held belief that people drink more alcohol following increase in negative affect. Integrating these findings under different theoretical models and limitations of this field of research, we collectively propose an agenda for future research to explore open questions surrounding affect and alcohol use.

An experimental investigation into the effect of negative affect on the behavioral economic demand for alcohol.

“…Thus, we manipulate mood and assess alcohol demand repeatedly in people's natural environment while collecting a much larger sample than previous studies. Compared to investigations performed solely in the lab, this increases the ecological validity of our findings, which is critical given the discrepant findings in real-world observational and lab-based experimental findings in this literature (Bresin et al, 2018;Dora, Piccirillo, et al, 2023). A previous study has established the validity of repeatedly assessing alcohol demand in everyday life (Merrill & Aston, 2020).…”

“…While these results are generally unsurprising, the large effect of daily coping motives on O max is noteworthy. These results mirror effects on daily alcohol use, where coping motives are associated with more frequent and heavier drinking, but this effect is not specific to days on which negative affect is high (Dora, Piccirillo, et al, 2023). Thus, the results here add to a body of literature (Bresin & Mekawi, 2021; M.…”

“…Participants reported alcohol use on the previous day on 23.5% of days ( M number of drinks = 4.20), meaning our participants reported roughly 1.5 drinking episodes per week on average. This means that participants drank slightly less relative to most daily alcohol use studies among college students, where participants tend to drink on 30%–40% of days and drink about 5–6 drinks per drinking episode on average (Dora, Piccirillo, et al, 2023). The distributions of daily O max (maximum amount of money spent on alcohol), breakpoint (price at which participant no longer indicated to consume any alcohol), intensity (number of drinks consumed when alcohol is free), and self-reported craving are visualized in Figure 1…”

“…In summary, this study adds to a body of literature (Acuff et al, 2020; Bresin et al, 2018; Dora, Copeland, et al, 2023) that shows that negative mood might have an immediate effect on cognitions and decisions surrounding alcohol. This is intriguing, as people are not more likely to drink and do not consume more alcohol on days they experience higher negative affect (Dora, Piccirillo, et al, 2023). The combination of these results suggests to us that the affect regulation hypothesis remains plausible but that we do not understand the full picture yet.…”

Associations between day-level affect profiles and same-day substance use among young adults.

“…Importantly, the finding that day-level profiles with higher levels of NA were linked to lower odds of alcohol use is contrary to several influential theories of alcohol use positing that a primary reason for alcohol use is to alleviate or avoid negative emotion (e.g., tension reduction models, self-medication). Findings add to a growing body of work that suggest limited support for the link between daily NA and alcohol use (e.g., Dora et al, 2023;Dvorak et al, 2016;Patrick et al, 2016). Accordingly, greater attention to boundary conditions by specifying when (i.e., situations) and for whom (i.e., person characteristics) NA is expected to be related to alcohol use will be critical for theory advancement (Busse et al, 2017).…”