Restraint & Attributions: Risk Factors in Alcohol Abuse

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We seek to continue our program of research on drinking restraint (i.e., the preoccupation with controlling alcohol intake). Restrained drinkers balance between the temptation to drink and the regulation of alcohol intake. We broaden our conceptual framework to consider the role of affect in the regulation of drinking by young-adult (age 21-30 years) social drinkers, who may be at risk for alcohol abuse. Our framework integrates distal and proximal cognitive and affective factors. The distal cognitive factors include drinking restraint and alcohol expectancies. Distal affect includes positive (extraversion, life satisfaction) and negative (neuroticism, depression) factors. The proximal cognitive factors are drinking motives (coping, enhancement) and the proximal affective factors are mood (positive, negative) before drinking. We hypothesize that the distal and proximal factors directly predict regulation outcomes related to nonbinge (< 4 drinks/day) and binge (> 5 drinks/day, alcohol problems) drinking. The proximal factors serve as intervening variables between the distal factors and alcohol regulation outcomes. We will: 1) Conduct a cross-sectional test of the proposed conceptual framework to identify the relative contributions of distal and proximal cognitive and affective factors in drinking regulation outcomes. A large sample of young adults will complete questionnaires that represent the constructs of interest and we will use structural equation modeling to test the conceptual framework. 2) Examine the role of proximal mood (positive and negative) and situational cognitions (i.e., drinking motives) as well as the contributions of trait affective and cognitive factors in situational drinking. We will conduct an experiment in which we induce mood (positive, negative, neutral) just prior to an ad libitum drinking task and assess situational drinking motives. In hierarchical multiple regressions, alcohol-related dependent variables will be regressed on trait and state variables, which are entered in an order that is consistent with the conceptual framework. 3) Examine whether changing proximal predictors of drinking (use mood regulation to change moods, behavioral strategies to change motives, or both) will enhance young adults' ability to regulate their alcohol intake. Participants will be randomly assigned to a 2-session intervention with follow-ups at 1-, 3-, and 6-months. Data from daily self-monitoring using cellular phones and interactive voice response (IVR) software will provide a detailed long-term perspective on situational antecedents of drinking. The proposed studies are innovative in their use of complementary methods (questionnaires, experiment, daily monitoring) and technology (cellular phones, IVR) to explore the role of cognitive and affective variables in an integrative conceptual model of drinking regulation.