Alcohol misuse in psychiatric patients and nonclinical individuals: The role of emotion dysregulation and impulsivity

Abstract

Notwithstanding the relevance of both emotion dysregulation and impulsivity to alcohol misuse, there is a dearth of study addressing their reciprocal interaction. The first aim of this study was to confirm the role played by difficulties in emotion regulation and trait impulsivity in explaining maladaptive alcohol use, comparing a mixed psychiatric sample (N = 130; 64.4% males; mean age = 43.30 years, SD = 11.83) with community-dwelling individuals (N = 307; 54.3% males; mean age = 36.01 years, SD = 11.88). Results corroborate this hypothesis, with emotion dysregulation and impulsiveness showing their significant association with alcohol misuse, and with levels of all these three components being significantly higher in the clinical sample. This study also extended extant research by explicating the hypothesised indirect effect of emotion dysregulation on alcohol misuse, through the effect of trait impulsivity. Results are also consistent with this latter hypothesis, with trait impulsivity accounting for the association between emotion dysregulation and alcohol misuse, albeit partially. As a whole, findings of this study highlight the potential utility of prevention and intervention efforts targeting emotion dysregulation and impulsivity in reducing alcohol misuse.

• Alcohol misuse
• emotion dysregulation
• impulsivity
• psychopathology
• psychotic disorders

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their precious comments.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Notes

¹Recent literature suggests that not all of Baron and Kenny’s steps are necessary for testing mediation, and in particular that step 1 (i.e. path c) is no longer a pre-condition required to further test mediation (Hayes, 2009; Kenny, Kashy, & Bolger, 1998). However, we did calculate also path c coefficient (i.e. the total effect) in order to estimate the effect proportion mediated measure (P_M; Shrout & Bolger, 2002).

²For example, although t-test allows to have different sample sizes, for a given total sample size, statistical power is maximized if group sizes are equal (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2001). However, as noted in Table 1, in order to minimize such risk, we corrected degrees of freedom according to Welch–Satterthwaite procedure when equal variance could not be assumed.