Coping motives, negative moods, and time-to-drink: Exploring alternative analytic models of coping motives as a moderator of daily mood-drinking covariation

Affect regulation models of alcohol use posit individuals use alcohol to modify mood states. Importantly, these models hypothesize that individual differences in coping motives for drinking moderate the relation between drinking and negative moods. Despite consistently significant correlations among negative moods, coping motives, and alcohol involvement in numerous between-level studies, within-person analyses have yielded results inconsistent with theoretical models. Analytic techniques modeling time-to-drink have provided results more consistent with theory, though there remains a paucity of research using these methods. The purpose of the current study was to explore whether coping motives moderate the relation between negative moods and the immediacy of drinking using methodology outlined by Hussong (2007) and Armeli, Todd, Conner, and Tennen (2008). Overall, our study showed little evidence for hypothesized mood–motive–alcohol use relations, thus demonstrating that time-to-drink approaches may not provide more consistent support for these hypotheses.