Previous research has shown that solitary drinking is associated with relieving negative affect. A new study examined the link between solitary drinking, social discomfort, alcohol problems, and drinking in response to negative affect and investigated whether greater social discomfort moderates the relationship between drinking in response to negative affect and solitary drinking in underage drinkers. Participants (N = 664) were current alcohol drinkers between the ages of 18 to 20 residing in the United States. Most participants were enrolled in college (63%) and completed an online survey through which they reported the percentage of time they drank in solitary and completed measures that assessed the following. Individual motivation for drinking to alleviate negative affect was measured using the Drinking Motives Questionnaire-Revised (DMQ-R). Social discomfort, which includes perceived social support, loneliness, and social anxiety, was measured using Interpersonal Support Evaluation List-Shortened Version (ISEL-12), UCLA Loneliness Scale (V3) and Social Interaction and Anxiety Scale (SIAS). Alcohol consumption, including past year alcohol use quantity and frequency, was measured using the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s (NIAAA) alcohol consumption question set. Lastly, alcohol-related problems, which include problematic alcohol use and behavior as well as negative consequences of alcohol use, were measured using the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) and he Brief Young Adult Alcohol Consequences Questionnaire (B-YAACQ). The authors ran bivariate correlations to assess the relationships between observed variables and solitary drinking and used SEM (Mplus) to evaluate the measurement model and test their moderation hypothesis. Results showed that 73.8% of participants reported ever drinking alone, with the mean percentage of time spent drinking alone being 25.3%. Furthermore, correlations between solitary drinking and observed variables were significant in that solitary drinking was associated with more alcohol problems, greater alcohol consumption, earlier age of alcohol involvement, greater social discomfort, and greater endorsement of drinking in response to negative affect. There was a significant association between solitary drinking and drinking in response to negative affect (p < 0.001) but not with social discomfort (p = 0.37). In addition, social discomfort moderated the relationship between drinking in response to negative affect and solitary drinking. The moderation model also showed that the main effect of ‘drinking in response to negative affect’ to solitary drinking was significant (p < 0.001), while the main effect of social discomfort to solitary drinking was again non-significant (p = 0.17). Moreover, there was a significant interaction between social discomfort and drinking in response to negative affect on solitary drinking (p = 0.01).
Take away: Social discomfort was not significantly associated with solitary drinking after accounting for drinking in response to negative affect. In fact, the relationship between drinking in response to negative affect and solitary drinking was magnified by lower, rather than higher, social discomfort.