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Intolerance of Uncertainty in Relation to Motives for Alcohol Use

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Abstract

Various anxiety-related risk factors have been proposed to contribute to the development of drinking motives. However, little is known about how intolerance of uncertainty (IU), defined as a cognitive bias to interpret ambiguity in a negative fashion, relates to motives for alcohol use. IU, as measured by the IUS-12, is comprised of prospective IU (cognitive perceptions of future uncertainty as threatening) and inhibitory IU (apprehension due to uncertainty). The current study sought to test whether IU was associated with the various motives for alcohol use, namely coping and conformity motives, and to investigate the relationship between the IUS-12 subfactors and motives for alcohol use. Undergraduates (N = 189) completed self-report measures assessing motives for drinking alcohol, depression and IU. Analyses revealed that IU was significantly associated with coping, conformity, and social motives for alcohol use, after covarying for levels of depression and gender. Additionally, results revealed that the prospective subscale of IU was significantly related to coping motives for drinking. Finally, hierarchical regression found the inhibitory subscale of IU to be significantly associated with conformity motives for alcohol use. Findings suggest that IU may be an important vulnerability factor contributing to drinking motives and greater alcohol use. IU may be a useful treatment target for protocols aiming to prevent the development of negative drinking motives.

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Notes

  1. The authors would like to note that the current pattern of analyses hold when the alcohol use consumption composite score and age are entered as covariates. Given that the addition of these covariates did not change the current analyses, the authors chose to leave them out of the models.

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Conflict of Interest

Mary E. Oglesby, Brian J. Albanese, Jesus Chavarria, and Dr. Norman B. Schmidt do not have any financial disclosures, funding, or support to disclose. Furthermore, the current investigation has not been presented elsewhere.

Informed Consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (national and institutional). Informed consent was obtained from all individual subjects participating in the study.

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No animal studies were carried out by the authors for this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Florida State University, 1107 W. Call St., Tallahassee, FL, 32306-4301, USA

    Mary E. Oglesby, Brian J. Albanese, Jesus Chavarria & Norman B. Schmidt

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  1. Mary E. Oglesby
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  2. Brian J. Albanese
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  3. Jesus Chavarria
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  4. Norman B. Schmidt
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Correspondence to Norman B. Schmidt.

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Oglesby, M.E., Albanese, B.J., Chavarria, J. et al. Intolerance of Uncertainty in Relation to Motives for Alcohol Use. Cogn Ther Res 39, 356–365 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-014-9665-1

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