Alcohol-related negative consequences among college students represent a public health concern manifesting in various forms, including embarrassing remarks, drunk driving, and academic impairment. Prior research has demonstrated that college students who consume alcohol for the purpose of managing negative emotions experience more adverse consequences, and that the capacity to control behavior in distressing situations is more strongly associated with substance use than the employment of specific emotion regulation strategies, with higher effortful control being associated with fewer alcohol-related negative consequences and mediating the relationship between motivational orientations and drinking frequency. Additionally, less voluntary emotional processes such as emotion dysregulation and affect lability have also been shown to be associated with alcohol-related problems, with affect lability predicting problematic drinking even after controlling for negative affect. Extending this prior research, the present study aims to comprehensively examine both the indirect effects via alcohol consumption and the direct effects of emotional processes and regulatory capacities, thereby elucidating the mechanisms through which failures in emotion regulation contribute to alcohol-related negative consequences.
This study recruited 274 college students who engage in moderate drinking, and participants completed a survey measuring alcohol consumption, effortful emotional control, poor emotional regulation, and affect lability. Structural equation modeling was employed for analysis, with alcohol-related problems and alcohol consumption specified as observed variables, while effortful emotional control, poor emotional regulation, and affect lability were specified as latent variables, each with three indicators corresponding to their respective subscales, and sex was included as a covariate in the model.
The results indicated that effortful emotional control exhibited a negative relationship with poor emotional regulation, while affect lability showed a positive relationship with poor emotional regulation. Poor emotional regulation was positively related to both alcohol consumption and alcohol-related problems. Furthermore, alcohol consumption demonstrated a positive association with alcohol-related problems. The overall indirect pathways from effortful emotional control and affect lability to alcohol-related problems were statistically significant. Specifically, effortful emotional control exerted a significant negative indirect influence on alcohol-related problems through poor emotional regulation (β = −0.11, p < 0.001), while affect lability exerted a significant positive indirect influence through the same pathway (β = 0.23, p < 0.001). A significant positive indirect pathway was also observed from affect lability to alcohol-related problems operating through both poor emotional regulation and alcohol consumption (β = 0.03, p = 0.045). Finally, poor emotional regulation showed a significant positive indirect effect on alcohol-related problems mediated by alcohol consumption (β = 0.05, p = 0.04).
Takeaway: Poor emotional regulation mediates the protective effect of effortful control and the risk effect of affect lability on alcohol-related problems, with poor regulation contributing to problems both through increased alcohol consumption and directly beyond its effect on drinking.