Coping Motivated Alcohol Use: The Role of Social Anxiety and Dissociation

abstract

Background: Social anxiety has been associated with higher rates of negative alcohol use consequences, and this relationship appears to be accounted for by coping drinking motives. Dissociation is commonly present in anxiety disorders, including social anxiety disorder, and may serve to unconsciously reduce negative emotions when more effortful coping strategies are not effective. Objectives: The present study examined whether the relationship between social anxiety, coping motives, and alcohol consequences was moderated by dissociative symptoms. It was hypothesized that coping motives would mediate the relationship between social anxiety and alcohol consequences, and that dissociation would moderate the relationship between social anxiety and coping motives. Undergraduate students who endorsed alcohol use within the past 30 days (n = 320) were recruited from a large public university. Participants completed measures of social anxiety, dissociation, alcohol motives, and alcohol consequences as part of a larger online questionnaire. Results: Coping motives were found to mediate the relationship between social anxiety and alcohol consequences. Dissociation did not moderate the relationship between social anxiety and coping motives. Dissociation was significantly associated with alcohol consequences via coping motives. Conclusions: Future research should include longitudinal research designs or ecological momentary assessment designs and should examine these relationships in clinical and community samples.

Keywords:

• Social anxiety
• alcohol use
• coping
• emotion regulation
• dissociation
• depersonalization
• derealization

Notes

1 The included covariates have all been shown to be associated with ARCs and social anxiety in previous research (see Schry & White, 2013 for a review and meta-analysis); thus, they were included to partial out shared variance that may be directly related to those variables. However, the analyses were also conducted with the covariates removed. The non-significant interaction remained non-significant for social anxiety and DPDR. However, the effects of coping motives became more robust in every model when the covariates were removed.

2 Separate analyses examining the LSAS fear subscale and the LSAS avoidance subscale were also conducted, and the results of the fear-only model and the avoidance-only model were similar to the results of the model using the LSAS total score. Specifically, the statistical significance and direction of relationships were the same across all models and the magnitude of the coefficients were similar.