Episode-specific drinking-to-cope motivation and next-day stress-reactivity

Abstract

Background: Research consistently shows drinking-to-cope (DTC) motivation is uniquely associated with drinking-related problems. We furthered this line of research by examining whether DTC motivation is predictive of processes indicative of poor emotion regulation. Specifically, we tested whether nighttime levels of episode-specific DTC motivation, controlling for drinking level, were associated with intensified affective reactions to stress the following day (i.e. stress-reactivity). Design and Methods: We used a micro-longitudinal design to test this hypothesis in two college student samples from demographically distinct institutions: a large, rural state university (N = 1421; 54% female) and an urban historically Black college/university (N = 452; 59% female). Results: In both samples the within-person association between daily stress and negative affect on days following drinking episodes was stronger in the positive direction when previous night's drinking was characterized by relatively higher levels of DTC motivation. We also found evidence among students at the state university that average levels of DTC motivation moderated the daily stress-negative affect association. Conclusions: Findings are consistent with the notion that DTC motivation confers a unique vulnerability that affects processes associated with emotion regulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Drinking-to-cope motivation
• alcohol use
• stress-reactivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It should be noted that although the enhancement scale demonstrated low internal consistency (especially in sample 2), we do not believe that this renders useless a comparison of its moderating effect to that of DTC motivation. For example, results of a multilevel regression analysis (using the analytic procedure described in the statistical analysis section) in which we predicted social drinking levels from both measures of episode-specific motives indicated that enhancement motives were a stronger unique predictor of social drinking in the state university sample (enhancement motives: b = 2.64, p < .001, versus DTC motives: b = 1.23, p < .001) and in the HBCU sample (b = 1.59, p < .001 versus DTC motives: b = –0.22, p = .29). Thus, in this case, the relatively low reliability of the enhancement measure did not attenuate its effects, at least relative to the effects of DTC motivation.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants 5P60-AA003510, 2T32AA007290, and R21AA017584 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and MO1RR10284 from the National Center for Research Resources.