A collaborative, preregistered meta-analysis on the daily association between affect and alcohol use in everyday life

It remains unclear whether people drink alcohol in response to the experience of negative and positive emotions in everyday life. By compiling and jointly analyzing hundreds of thousands reports from diary and EMA datasets, our goal was to provide conclusive tests to the hypotheses that negative and positive affect should both be associated with alcohol use on a daily level, such that people are more likely to drink and to consume more drinks on days they report negative or positive affect that is higher than usual. We compiled individual participant level data from diary and EMA studies that assessed the number of alcoholic drinks consumed each day or evening and daily or momentary mood. Our dataset included 353,762 daily observations from 12,394 participants and 69 studies. We analyzed the data using Bayesian mixed-effects models, which accounted for variation at the study and participant level. On days they experienced higher negative affect (+1 SD), participants were estimated to be 5-10% less likely to drink and to consume 0 to 0.02 fewer drinks. Participants were estimated to be 16-28% more likely to drink on days they experience higher positive affect, but to only consume an additional 0.04 to 0.07 drinks. Thus, the findings of this meta-analysis suggest that positive, but not negative affect is associated with an increased likelihood of drinking in daily data.

Apr 7, 2022