Alcohol use is highly prevalent among young adults, including college students, and impulsivity is known as a major risk factor for alcohol use, characterized by heightened sensitivity to immediate rewards and difficulty inhibiting behavior. However, existing studies have primarily been conducted in laboratory settings, tending to oversimplify the relationship between impulsivity and alcohol use or failing to adequately reflect the real-world drinking context. While some recent studies have suggested that social incentives may strengthen the relationship between impulsivity and alcohol use, these too lack more sophisticated validation using real-time data. Therefore, the present study aims to examine how social and alcohol incentives moderate the relationship between impulsivity and alcohol consumption in the everyday drinking context of college students, using an intensive longitudinal design with a mobile daily diary approach.
The study recruited 102 young adults aged 18 to 30 and collected data prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2020) using a mobile daily diary method. For 14 consecutive days, participants reported their daily alcohol use, drinking context, and the influence of incentives. Impulsivity was assessed using the Impulsiveness subscale of the Eysenck Impulsivity Questionnaire, while drinking incentives were categorized into social/party and alcohol-related domains. Alcohol consumption was recorded in standard drink units and aggregated per event. A Poisson multilevel regression model was employed to examine the effects of impulsivity and drinking incentives on total alcohol consumption, controlling for sex assigned at birth and weekend effects.
According to the study results, both social/party incentives and alcohol-related incentives showed significant positive associations with the total number of drinks consumed. Notably, a significant interaction effect was found between social/party incentives and impulsivity. Simple slope analyses indicated that as social/party incentives increased, alcohol consumption also increased across all levels of impulsivity—low (b = 0.13), moderate (b = 0.20), and high (b = 0.27)—with the effect size being greater at higher levels of impulsivity. This suggests that individuals with heightened sensitivity to immediate rewards, characteristic of high impulsivity, are more likely to consume greater amounts of alcohol in socially stimulating environments (e.g., parties, opportunities to meet new people). In contrast, while alcohol-related incentives were associated with greater alcohol consumption, no significant interaction with impulsivity was observed.
Takeaway: Individuals with high levels of impulsivity tend to be more influenced by social/party incentives during drinking events.