Thanksgiving Day Alcohol Use

Associations With Expectations and Negative Affect

Bibliographic Data

ID13652425
AuthorsRoss E O’hara (0000-0001-8271-8910, Department of Psychiatry, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, Farmington, CT, USA), Wenhuan Wang (0000-0002-2192-1306, University of Michigan), Jordan D Troisi (0000-0001-8731-5811, Sewanee: The University of the South, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume123
Issue3
Pages741-758
Publication date2019-03-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePsychological Reports (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0033-2941 • E-ISSN: 1558-691X
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0033294119835763
PMID30857481
OpenAlexW2922200279
LanguageEN
References cited37

Thanksgiving is known for celebration, indulgence, and, unfortunately, alcohol-related consequences. No research to date, however, has explored predictors of Thanksgiving drinking that may help to explain the risky behaviors commonly observed over this holiday. We examined whether Thanksgiving Day drinking is related to expectations about the holiday and negative affect, as well as gender differences in these associations. This study is the first to examine Thanksgiving as a high-risk drinking event and to focus exclusively on U.S. non-college adults. Two hundred eight participants recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk completed online surveys one week before, one day before, and one day after Thanksgiving 2016. Measures included expectations about Thanksgiving, daily anxiety, depressed affect, stress, and alcohol use. Logistic and Poisson regressions were used to predict whether participants drank and how much they drank on Thanksgiving Day, respectively. Choosing to drink on Thanksgiving was associated with higher daily anxiety but not with daily depressed affect or stress. Among men who drank on Thanksgiving, higher daily depressed affect was associated with more consumption, especially for men with positive expectations about Thanksgiving. Among women who drank on Thanksgiving, higher daily depressed affect was associated with more consumption for women with negative expectations about Thanksgiving but less consumption for women with positive expectations. These findings suggest that negative affect experienced during Thanksgiving is relevant to event-specific alcohol use. This study also underscores the importance of research that focuses on specific, high-risk drinking events, and uses samples of non-college U.S. adults

Affect (linguistics · Alcohol · Alcohol consumption · Anxiety · Consumption (sociology · Logistic regression · Poisson regression · Psychiatry · Behavioral Health and Interventions · Clinical Psychology · Demography · Medicine · Psychology · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology · Substance Abuse Treatment and Outcomes