Many college students experience negative consequences from alcohol use, ranging from hangovers and academic difficulties to injuries and risky behaviors. However, not all drinking occasions lead to such outcomes, as some students effectively reduce their risk by employing protective behavioral strategies (PBS). Despite their proven effectiveness, discrepancies often arise between students’ intentions to drink safely and their actual behaviors—a phenomenon known as the intention–behavior gap. Guided by Temporal Self-Regulation Theory (TST), this study aims to examine how individual differences in executive functions (EF)—including working memory, set-shifting, and inhibition—influence the translation of safe-drinking intentions into action.
A total of 77 undergraduate students who reported consuming at least one alcoholic beverage per week and experiencing at least one alcohol-related consequence within the past 90 days participated in the study. At baseline, participants completed self-report surveys assessing demographics and typical protective behavioral strategies (PBS) use, as well as executive functioning (EF) performance tasks measuring working memory, set-shifting, and inhibition. Following baseline assessment, participants completed a three-week ecological momentary assessment (EMA) protocol with twice-daily surveys for 21 consecutive days. Each EMA prompt assessed prior-day substance use and PBS use, along with same-day intentions to drink and use PBS. Time-lagged multilevel regression models examined the relationships between EF abilities, drinking intentions, PBS use, and alcohol-related outcomes.
The study found that intentions to use protective behavioral strategies (PBS) significantly predicted actual PBS use, both at the global level and at the daily level, after controlling for alcohol consumption and affect. However, in contrast to the TST, executive functioning measures—working memory, set-shifting, and inhibition—did not significantly predict PBS use, nor did they moderate the intention-behavior relationship for most strategy types. One exception emerged for set-shifting and Modifying PBS: students with greater set-shifting errors (indicating lower cognitive flexibility) reported lower use of Modifying PBS, particularly when PBS intentions were high. These findings suggest that while intentions represent a primary driver of harm-reduction strategy use, cognitive flexibility may influence the translation of intentions into behavior for certain strategy subtypes.
Takeaway: Alcohol prevention and intervention programs may benefit from incorporating strategies to strengthen PBS use intentions across all drinkers, as the intention-behavior relationship appears robust regardless of individual variations in executive functioning capacity.