Within-day associations between affect and intentions to drink alcohol in adolescents and young adults: A registered...

Motivational theories hypothesizing that people drink to relieve negative affect have not been supported using data from people's daily lives. People may experience negative affect when alcohol is unavailable or when use would conflict with people's current goals, but people's thoughts about alcohol use, such as intentions to drink later in the day, are less contextually constrained. Alcohol intentions may serve as affect regulation and lead to decreases in negative or increases in positive affect prior to drinking itself.

This registered report provides an initial test of this hypothesis across two large ecological momentary assessment samples of adolescents and young adults (total n = 1,511). We tested whether daily drinking intentions were associated with levels and within-day changes in negative and positive affect in two large samples of adolescents and young adults and whether drinking history and motives moderated these associations.

We found evidence, replicated across studies, that positive affect was higher and increased more on days when people reported intending to drink more than usual, but negative affect was only very weakly associated with daily drinking intentions. We found no evidence of moderation that replicated across samples.

Results suggest that prior research linking positive affect and alcohol use is at least in part capturing the anticipation of drinking rather than a causal association between affect and drinking behaviors among adolescents and young adults. Theories should consider how anticipation, as well as the contexts in which drinking occurs, shapes people's motives for drinking and their drinking behaviors themselves. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).