Negative Affect, Harassment and Problematic Alcohol Use in Young Adults

Abstract

Background: While research suggests that both negative affect and alcohol use are impacted by exposure to harassment (i.e., sexual harassment, generalized harassment or bullying), less is known about the effect of harassment on negative affect subsequently leading to alcohol consumption, particularly in young adults. We examined the mediating role of negative affect on the relationships between sexual and generalized harassment at school and alcohol misuse. Methods: Participants were 2899 incoming freshmen in fall of 2011 who completed a Web-based survey assessing demographics (T0), sexual and generalized harassment at school (T0-T2), negative affect (T3), and problems associated with drinking, binge drinking, and drinking to intoxication (T0, T4, T5). Separate hybrid path models were fitted in Mplus v.8.8 for generalized harassment and sexual harassment and each outcome. Results: Mediation analyses showed a small but significant indirect effect for the sexual harassment model (beta = 0.05, S.E. = 0.01, p < 0.001) and generalized harassment (beta = 0.03, S.E. = 0.01, p < 0.01), indicating that negative affect partially mediated the associations between harassment early in students’ college experience and later problems associated with drinking. No significant indirect effects were found for the binge drinking or intoxication models. Conclusions: High levels of negative affect associated with harassment may contribute to longer term impact on problematic use of alcohol in young adults, providing evidence that the effects of harassment on drinking may partly stem from harassment’s lingering effects on negative affective pathways.

Keywords:

• Negative affect
• harassment
• alcohol use

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no financial, research, organizational, or other interests to disclose that are relevant to the execution of this research or this publication.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) grant awarded to Kathleen Rospenda (R01AA018138) and Hagar Hallihan (K99AA030665). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism or the National Institutes of Health. No sponsor or funding source has a role in the design or conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis or interpretation of the data; or preparation, review or approval of the manuscript