Examination of a Bi-Directional Relationship between Urgency and Alcohol Use

The proposed study examined whether negative urgency and positive urgency are dynamic traits that hold bi-directional relationships with binge and prolonged alcohol use across time. Individuals between the ages of 18-30 were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk; n = 179) and university student (n = 66) pools. Participants completed three batteries of self-report assessments approximately 30 days apart, each containing measures assessing negative and positive urgency, as well as drinking frequency and binge behavior during the prior month. Latent variable cross-lagged panel models examined the effects of alcohol use from the previous month on negative and positive urgency while controlling for concurrent and autoregressive effects. Results of the current study indicated that for the full sample, there was not an effect for the influence of binge/prolonged drinking on either negative or positive urgency during the subsequent month. However, when examined separately by sample (Turkers vs. university) and gender (male vs. female), significant effects were found more for individuals who were Turkers, male, and/or heavy drinkers, suggesting that increases in positive and negative urgency at Time 2 could be partially explained by variance in drinking patterns at Time 1 for these individuals. However, these relationships were not replicated again between Time 2 and Time 3 due to a decrease in all drinking behaviors during these times. Lastly, the study found that while urgency scores were related to psychosocial problems and dependence symptoms associated with drinking, there was no evidence to support that urgency scores had substantial relationships to specific frequency and/or bingeing behavior across the overall sample, although positive urgency had support for a relationship with bingeing, particularly among heavily drinking men. Thus, while the primary findings did not indicate any effects for a general sample of young adults, the effects observed among heavy male drinkers in the present study add to a growing body of literature indicating potential for interactive effects among personality, environmental, and sociobiological factors across the trajectory of the human lifespan. Future research that continues to examine urgency and how it relates to alcohol use in longitudinal contexts, utilizing diverse samples, is warranted