Binge drinking among college students has emerged as a major factor that adversely affects both physical and mental health and exacerbates alcohol-related problems. While previous studies have primarily emphasized that alcohol consumption among college students is mostly triggered by social situations, they have also suggested that psychological and physical pain can serve as catalysts for drinking; however, the relationship between pain and negative alcohol-related outcomes has not been consistently determined. In particular, reward drinking and relief drinking motives have been identified as important factors that moderate this relationship, thereby raising the need to reconcile the inconsistent findings across prior studies. Therefore, the present study aims to examine how pain influences alcohol-related negative consequences among binge-drinking college students and how this relationship is moderated by reward and relief drinking motives.
The study was conducted with a sample of 436 college students who had experienced binge drinking within the past month. In the first survey (T1), participants were assessed for pain intensity and interference using the PROMIS Pain Intensity and Pain Interference scales, and their reward and relief drinking motives were measured via the IDS-27. Additionally, T1 collected data on alcohol-related negative consequences over the past 21 days using the B-YAACQ, as well as alcohol consumption through a modified DDQ. In the second survey (T2), data on alcohol-related negative consequences and alcohol consumption were collected in the same manner as in T1, enabling an analysis of the effects of pain and drinking motives measured at T1 on alcohol-related negative consequences at T2. The collected data were analyzed using Mplus software with maximum likelihood estimation (MLR) and the Johnson-Neyman technique to test the interaction model and evaluate the moderating effects of pain and drinking motives.
According to the findings, the pain at T1 did not exhibit a direct main effect on alcohol-related negative consequences at T2; however, a moderating effect based on drinking motives was observed. Among students with low reward motives, higher levels of pain at T1 were positively associated with an increase in alcohol-related negative consequences at T2, indicating that greater pain corresponded with more negative outcomes. In contrast, for students with high reward motives, higher levels of pain were associated with fewer negative consequences, demonstrating a negative relationship. Conversely, with respect to relief motives, a significant positive association between pain and negative consequences was observed among students with high relief motives, while no significant relationship emerged for those with low or average relief motives. These findings underscore the critical role that individual drinking motives play in moderating the relationship between pain and alcohol-related negative consequences in a college population.
Takeaway: Students with strong relief motivations or weak reward motivations demonstrated an escalation in alcohol-related negative consequences as pain levels rose.