Stress biases alcohol choice across timescales in daily life, but context gates its expression

Resumen de los autores

Laboratory studies consistently support the hypothesis that people drink alcohol to regulate stress and negative affect, yet ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies have repeatedly failed to detect the predicted within-person association between stress or negative affect and drinking. We applied a value-based decision-making (VBDM) framework to test where in the chain from affective state to behavior this disconnect arises. We recruited 250 at-risk adult drinkers (median AUDIT=9) via Prolific. Participants completed a 14-day EMA protocol with two daily scheduled prompts plus optional event-contingent self-initiation following stressors (5,978 completed EMA assessments; 99.5% of choice trials completed). At each prompt, they self-reported affective and contextual states and completed 160 trials of a cognitive choice task pairing personalized alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. Drift diffusion modeling decomposed choice and response time data into decision parameters; mixed-effects LASSO and random forest models identified moderators of affect-choice associations. Stressful events increased alcohol choice by ~10 percentage points and selectively biased evidence accumulation toward alcohol without affecting decision carefulness or value sensitivity, replicating prior laboratory findings. Raw associations attenuated when covariates were included; contextual moderators (presence of strangers, alcohol expectancies, time-of-day, alcohol cue visibility) consistently shifted choice in directions predicted by VBDM. Affect regulation processes are detectable at the level of choice tendency in daily life, but their behavioral expression depends on context, suggesting the theory may require reformulation as a context-dependent mechanism. Our sample consisted of at-risk, non-treatment-seeking adult US drinkers recruited online; our findings may not generalize to treatment-seeking, adolescent, or non-Western samples.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Dora, J., van Lissa, C. J., Shinn, M., Kuczynski, A. M., Kelly, G., Kaurin, A., & King, K. (2026). Stress biases alcohol choice across timescales in daily life, but context gates its expression. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/pgd43_v1