Drinking to Cope is Uniquely Associated with Less Specific and Bleaker Future Goal Generation in Young Hazardous Drinkers

Abstract

Groups with mental health and/or substance use problems generate less detailed descriptions of their future goals. As substance use to cope with negative affect is common to both groups, this characteristic might be uniquely associated with less specific goal descriptions. To test this prediction, 229 past year hazardous drinking undergraduates aged 18–25 years wrote about three positive future life goals in an open-ended survey, before reporting their internalizing (anxiety and depression) symptoms, alcohol dependence severity and motivations for drinking: coping, conformity, enhancement and social. Future goal descriptions were experimenter-rated for detail specificity, and participant-self-rated for positivity, vividness, achievability, and importance. Effort in goal writing was indexed by time spent writing and total word count. Multiple regression analyses revealed that drinking to cope was uniquely associated with the production of less detailed goals, and lower self-rated positivity and vividness of goals (achievability and importance were also marginally lower), over and above internalizing symptoms, alcohol dependence severity, drinking for conformity, enhancement and social motives, age, and gender. However, drinking to cope was not uniquely associated with reduced effort in writing goals: time spent and word count. In sum, drinking to cope with negative affect is a unique characteristic predicting the generation of less detailed and bleaker (less positive and vivid) future goals, and this is not due to lower effort in reporting. Future goal generation may play a role in the aetiology of comorbidity of mental health and substance use problems, and therapeutic targeting of goal generation might benefit both conditions.