Revisiting the role of negative affect in alcohol use disorder: A longitudinal evaluation of Koob's allostatic model

Little research has tested the within-person processes that are thought to underlie alcohol use disorder as depicted in Koob and Le Moal's allostatic model of addiction in humans, specifically the associations between alcohol consumption, withdrawal, and negative affect.

We examined the temporal dynamics among these constructs over time using data from two samples that tracked undergraduate students across their college experience (n = 3,138 and 417). We estimated a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model to parse between- and within-person associations across time.

At the between-person level, there was moderate-to-high overlap between withdrawal and negative affect, whereas there was little-to-weak overlap between alcohol consumption and negative affect. At the within-person level, there was no strong evidence of bidirectional prospective associations for withdrawal and negative affect or consumption and negative affect. Within-person cross-sectional associations were also negligible, with some weak but inconsistent evidence that withdrawal and negative affect became increasingly coupled over time. These findings were robust across numerous study design features that included conditioning on heavier, more chronic drinking; focusing on participants with a family history of alcohol problems; and examining differing subforms of negative affect, varied assessment methods for withdrawal and negative affect, and varied timescales of negative affect.

Our findings offer weak support for the within-person associations proposed by Koob's allostatic model and suggest that negative affect may function more robustly as a weak trait-level risk factor for alcohol consumption. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).