Drinking to Cope With Depressive Symptoms and Ruminative Thinking: A Multiple Mediation Model Among College Students

ABSTRACT

Background: Understanding the potential psychosocial mechanisms that explain (i.e., mediate) the associations between depressive symptoms and alcohol-related problems can improve interventions targeting college students. Objectives: The current research examined four distinct facets of rumination (e.g., problem-focused thoughts, counterfactual thinking, repetitive thoughts, and anticipatory thoughts) and drinking to cope motives as potential explanatory mechanisms by which depressive symptoms are associated with increased alcohol-related problems. Method: Participants were undergraduate students from a large, southeastern university in the United States that consumed at least one drink per typical week in the previous month (n = 403). The majority of participants were female (n = 291; 72.2%), identified as being either White, non-Hispanic (n = 210; 52.1%), or African American (n = 110; 27.3%), and reported a mean age of 21.92 (SD = 5.75) years. Results: Structural equation modeling was conducted examining the concurrent associations between depressive symptoms, rumination facets, drinking to cope motives, and alcohol-related problems (i.e., cross-sectional). There was one significant double-mediated association that suggested that increased depressive symptoms is associated with increased problem-focused thoughts, which is associated with higher drinking to cope motives and alcohol-related problems. Conclusions/Importance: Our results suggests that problem-focused thoughts at least partially explains the associations between depression and maladaptive coping (i.e., drinking to cope), which in turn is related to problematic drinking among college students. Limitations and future directions are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Alcohol-related problems
• drinking to cope
• rumination
• depressive symptoms
• college students

Notes

1 An additional correlation analysis was ran examining social, conformity, and enhancement motives with all study variables of interest within the present study. All three drinking motives had weak positive correlations with depressive symptoms, strong positive correlation with drinking to cope motives, and had weak to moderate positive correlations with both alcohol use and alcohol-related problems. Further, social and enhancement motives had weak positive correlations with all four rumination subcomponents. A supplementary table of all correlations are available from the authors on request.