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The role of affect, emotion management, and attentional bias in young adult drinking: An experience sampling study

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Abstract

Rationale

Coping with negative affect is central to several prominent etiological models of alcohol use. These models posit that alcohol use becomes negatively reinforced due to its ability to alleviate negative affect. However, there have been mixed findings when testing this association at the event-level.

Objectives

The current experience sampling study sought to clarify this by testing if (1) within-person changes in the perceived difficulty of managing emotional distress is a significant predictor of alcohol consumption, over and above levels negative and positive affect and (2) whether acute changes in affective experiences give rise to increased attentional bias toward alcohol-related cues in the environment and if attentional bias mediates the association between difficulty managing emotions and alcohol consumption. Participants were 92 college students aged 18–25, who drink alcohol at least moderately.

Methods

Participants completed 28 days of experiencing sampling measures on their mood, difficulty managing emotions, alcohol-related attentional biases, and drinking.

Results

Findings showed that neither negative affect nor difficult managing emotions had significant effects on alcohol use. However, positive affect exhibited the expected associations with both attentional biases and drinking. State positive affect predicted acute increases in attentional biases and drinking, whereas trait positive affect was inversely associated with trait attentional biases and alcohol use. Alcohol-related attentional biases exhibited significant within-person variance; however, its relationship with drinking was only significant when the constructs were assessed concurrently at night and did not mediate the relationship between affect and alcohol use.

Conclusions

Results highlight the importance of positive affect in this population.

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Notes

  1. We also estimated a simplified alternative model where the nighttime AAB and drinking were reversed in order, such that drinking was the mediator and nighttime AAB the final outcome. In this model, the association between nighttime drinking and nighttime AAB remained significant (b = 0.05, p = .003).

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Funding

This research was supported in part by grants from National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (R01AA022301, PI: Simons; L30AA027041, PI: Emery) and the Center for Brain and Behavior Research (PI: Emery).

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Correspondence to Noah N. Emery.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Emery, N.N., Simons, J.S. The role of affect, emotion management, and attentional bias in young adult drinking: An experience sampling study. Psychopharmacology 237, 1557–1575 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-020-05480-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-020-05480-5

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