The daily association between affect and alcohol use: A meta-analysis of individual participant data

Abstract

Influential psychological theories hypothesize that people consume alcohol in response to the experience of both negative and positive emotions. Despite two decades of daily diary and ecological momentary assessment research, it remains unclear whether people consume more alcohol on days they experience higher negative and positive affect in everyday life. In this preregistered meta-analysis, we synthesized the evidence for these daily associations between affect and alcohol use. We included individual participant data from 69 studies (N = 12,394), which used daily and momentary surveys to assess affect and the number of alcoholic drinks consumed. Results indicate that people are not more likely to drink on days they experience high negative affect, but are more likely to drink and drink heavily on days high in positive affect. People self-reporting a motivational tendency to drink-to-cope and drink-to-enhance consumed more alcohol, but not on days they experienced higher negative and positive affect. Results were robust across different operationalizations of affect, study designs, study populations, and individual characteristics. These findings challenge the long-held belief that people drink more alcohol following increases in negative affect. Integrating these findings under different theoretical models and limitations of this field of research, we collectively propose an agenda for future research to explore open questions surrounding affect and alcohol use.

Keywords: affect; alcohol use; drinking motives; emotion; meta-analysis.

Figure 1.

Selection procedure of included studies. k = number of datasets; N = number of participants; H1a: Daily association between negative affect and alcohol use. H1b: Daily association between positive affect and alcohol use. H2a: Cross-level interaction between negative affect and coping motives on alcohol use. H2b: Cross-level interaction between positive affect and enhancement motives on alcohol use.

Figure 2.

Distributions of study variables. The dashed lines represent the respective mean.

Figure 3.

Heat map of correlations between participant-aggregated affect, participant-aggregated number of drinks, drinking motives, self-reported alcohol use at baseline, and age. The values in each tile represent the respective Pearson’s correlation coefficient. The magnitude and direction of correlations are visualized with colors.

Figure 4.

Forest plots of the effect of negative affect on the likelihood to drink with effect sizes larger (smaller) than 1 indicating a higher (lower) probability to drink as affect increases (left) and the number of drinks consumed on drinking days with positive (negative) effect sizes indicating a higher (lower) number of drinks consumed (right). Displayed are point estimates surrounded by the 95% Bayesian Credible Interval.

Figure 5.

Forest plots of the effect of positive affect on the likelihood to drink with effect sizes larger (smaller) than 1 indicating a higher (lower) probability to drink as affect increases (left) and the number of drinks consumed on drinking days with positive (negative) effect sizes indicating a higher (lower) number of drinks consumed (right). Displayed are point estimates surrounded by the 95% Bayesian Credible Interval.

Figure 6.

The effect of negative affect (left) and positive affect (right) on the likelihood that participants drink (top) as well as the number of drinks consumed on drinking days (bottom) for participants reporting low, average, and high coping and enhancement motives respectively.