Guilt and Expressive Writing for Reducing Alcohol Use in College Students

Summary

This research seeks to evaluate expressive writing as a novel intervention for problem drinking among college students. The vast majority of individually focused brief interventions targeting college drinking have focused on personalized feedback approaches and recent innovations have largely been limited to finer distinctions of these, which require assessment and programming for implementation. The present research proposes expressive writing as a novel alternative, which has been used extensively in other domains but not as an alcohol intervention strategy.

H1a: Participants writing about negative drinking events will show reduced drinking and drinking-related negative consequences relative to students in the neutral control group.

H1b: Participants writing about distressing non-alcohol events will show increased psychological wellbeing relative to students in the neutral control group.

H1c: Participants writing about negative drinking events will show reduced drinking and consequences compared with an empirically-supported brief intervention (i.e., PNF). This is an exploratory hypothesis.

H2a: Alcohol narratives will have stronger effects on alcohol outcomes relative to distress narratives.

H2b: Alcohol guilt narratives will have the strongest effect on alcohol outcomes relative to all other conditions.

H3a: Expression of guilt, assessed by self-report and by content coding with LIWC, will mediate intervention effects on drinking outcomes.

H3b: Change thought, assessed by LIWC coding, will mediate intervention effects on drinking.

Conditions

• Alcohol Consumption

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Expressive Writing

Expressive writing is a brief intervention that has been linked to various health and social benefits. Expressing emotions through writing can lead to decreased levels of stress and negative affect, thereby serving as a coping mechanism. Furthermore, expressive writing allows participants to reconstruct their traumatic experiences and reorganize their memory of these events into a narrative. Expressive writing has been used to target drinking. Research has found that students have reduced drinking intentions after writing about a negative drinking event compared to control,suggesting that a narrative intervention may be effective in reducing drinking. Other research suggests that feelings of guilt were more strongly associated with intentions to reduce drinking after writing about a negative drinking event, and that this event-related guilt mediated intervention effects.

BEHAVIORAL

Personalized Normative Feedback

PNF approaches use information designed to correct normative misperceptions to reduce heavy drinking. Three pieces of information are necessary when providing personalized normative feedback: information about a student's own drinking, information about the student's perceptions of others' drinking, and information about others' actual drinking. The presentation of this information is designed to change students' perceptions of "normal" drinking by exposing their misperceptions of the norm as well as by comparing their behavior with "normal" behavior.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)

  collaborator NIH

• University of Houston

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

SINGLE

Model

FACTORIAL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

26 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2016-09-30

Primary Completion

2019-08-31

Completion

2020-08-31