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The feelings when you feel like drinking: emotion differentiation and alcohol use

Do you drink? And if so, do you notice anything about your emotions before and after drinking? Some people reported that they use alcohol to cope with unpleasant emotions, such as sadness and anxiety. Some said that they used it for enhancing pleasant emotions, such as excitement or relaxation (1). Do these examples of alcohol-related emotions ring a bell with you?

Psychologists have been interested to find out whether emotions can serve as predictors of alcohol (mis)use in order to unravel who is likely to use more alcohol and when people are prone to drinking. Unfortunately, psychologists arrived at mixed findings in testing if the presence of emotions and alcohol use are statistically related. Recent attempts in summarizing published data from the past decades only found trivial-to-small daily associations between emotions and alcohol use, for example, an effect of 0.04 to 0.07 additional drinks on a day high in pleasant emotions (2,3).

These somewhat underwhelming findings could be due to the possibility that drinking is not associated by the mere presence or absence of emotions, but with emotion differentiation. You might think, “What is emotion differentiation?” Conceptually, emotion differentiation is an integrated skill of using emotion vocabulary to describe emotions experienced (4). Sometimes emotions are highly differentiated so that they are well distinguished and labelled (“I am more like disappointed, but not angry”; “I feel proud and triumphant!”). But sometimes we just feel good/bad without knowing precisely what’s going on. In that case, low emotion differentiation might happen, and you aren’t aware of the qualitative differences between the emotions you experience, or when you experience different emotions, but you have difficulty naming them.

So, how is alcohol use related to emotion differentiation? In a study where young adults reported their emotions multiple times daily over 21 days, it was found that less differentiation of unpleasant emotions was associated with more alcohol consumption in combination with intense emotions prior to drinking activities (5). In other words, if one feels miserable without being able to put the feelings into words before going for a drink, one is likely to drink more.

Alcohol problem is also related to the differentiation of pleasant emotions. A study with young adults who used alcohol moderately to heavily found that, the more drinking problems they acknowledged, the less likely they gave differentiated responses on pleasant emotions they experienced over 28 days of data collection (6). Please note that emotion differentiation and drinking were measured at about the same time, so it cannot be inferred that one causes the other. But this finding does make use reflect on the role of pleasant emotions in alcohol use: Are these young drinkers less skilled in labelling “feeling good” into distinct emotions of joy, excitement, enthusiasm etc.? Is it possible that drinkers mix up the “feeling good” from drinking with some specific positive emotions that they truly yearn for, say, feeling accomplished and content, and that’s why they keep using alcohol heavily?

We are not yet sure if these findings are generalizable to a broader population (especially in terms of age). But having read all these, did you reflect a bit more on how emotions are related to your drinking behaviour? For you, what are the pleasant emotions that are associated with drinking? Who knows, maybe by better differentiating our emotions we can better decide whether we should get a drink – or two.

This blog was written by Edmund Lo (PhD candidate at Radboud University) for RAD-blog, the blog about smoking, alcohol, drugs and diet: https://rad-blog.com/2022/10/14/the-feelings-when-you-feel-like-drinking-emotion-differentiation-and-alcohol-use/

References

  1. Leigh, B. C. (1989). In search of the Seven Dwarves: Issues of measurement and meaning in alcohol expectancy research. Psychological Bulletin, 105(3), 361.
  2. Dora, J., Piccirillo, M., Foster, K. T., Arbeau, K., Armeli, S., Auriacombe, M., Bartholow, B. D., Beltz, A., Blumenstock, S., Bold, K., & others. (2022). The daily association between affect and alcohol use: A meta-analysis of individual participant data.
  3. Tovmasyan, A., Monk, R. L., & Heim, D. (2022). Towards an affect intensity regulation hypothesis: Systematic review and meta-analyses of the relationship between affective states and alcohol consumption. PloS One, 17(1), e0262670.
  4. Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., & McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10-16.
  5. Kashdan, T. B., Ferssizidis, P., Collins, R. L., & Muraven, M. (2010). Emotion Differentiation as Resilience Against Excessive Alcohol Use: An Ecological Momentary Assessment in Underage Social Drinkers. Psychological Science, 21(9), 1341–1347. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610379863
  6. Emery, N. N., Simons, J. S., Clarke, C. J., & Gaher, R. M. (2014). Emotion differentiation and alcohol-related problems: The mediating role of urgency. Addictive Behaviors, 39(10), 1459–1463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2014.05.004