Affective Dependence, Self-Regulation, and Alcohol Problems: Between- and Within-Person Associations

Positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) are associated with goal pursuit in addition to dysregulated behavior. Affective dependence (i.e., the correlation between PA and NA) may be a marker for good self-regulation on the one hand (weaker dependence) and poor self-regulation on the other (stronger dependence). This study sought to elucidate the role of affective dependence as a predictor of goal pursuit and alcohol problems at the within- and between-person levels. Participants were 100 college students aged 18-25 years, who drank alcohol at least moderately, and completed a 21-day ecological momentary assessment study regarding affect, academic goal pursuit, idiographic goal pursuit, alcohol use, and alcohol problems. Multilevel time series models were estimated. Consistent with hypotheses, affective dependence predicted more alcohol problems and decreased academic goal pursuit at the within-person level. Importantly, effects on academic goal pursuit included perceived achievement and progress related to academics, as well as time spent studying, an objective marker for academic engagement. Effects were significant controlling for autoregressive effects, lagged residuals of PA and NA, concurrent alcohol use, day of the week, age, gender, and trait affective dependence. Thus, this study provides robust tests of lagged within-person effects of affective dependence. The effect of affective dependence on idiographic goal pursuit was not significant, contrary to hypothesis. Affective dependence was not significantly associated with alcohol problems or goal pursuit at the between-person level. Results suggest that affective dependence is a common factor explaining problems related to alcohol use and psychological functioning more broadly.