Despite speculation that peers’ alcohol-related content on social media sites (SMS) may influence the alcohol use behaviors of SMS frequenting college students, this relationship has not been investigated longitudinally. The current prospective study assesses the relationship between exposure to peers’ alcohol-related SMS content and later-drinking among first-year college students. Among 408 first-year students, total exposure to peers’ alcohol-related content on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat during the initial 6 weeks of college predicted alcohol consumption 6 months later. The rather robust relationship persisted even after students’ and close friends drinking were accounted for, indicating that alcohol references on SMS do not simply reflect alcohol use behaviors that would otherwise be observed in the absence of SMS and be predictive of later alcohol use. Findings also illuminate important gender differences in the degree to which peers’ alcohol-related SMS content influenced later drinking behavior as well as psychological mediators of this relationship. Among females, enhancement drinking motives and beliefs about the role of alcohol in the college experience fully mediated the relationship between SMS alcohol exposure and later drinking. Males, however, evidenced a much stronger predictive relationship between SMS alcohol exposure and second semester drinking, with this relationship only partially explained by perceptions of drinking norms, enhancement drinking motives, and beliefs about the role of alcohol in the college experience. Implications of these findings for college drinking prevention efforts and directions for future research are discussed.

While research suggests that parents continue to influence students' marijuana use after matriculation to college, there is limited data examining how parents communicate about marijuana use and what impact parent marijuana communication has on college student outcomes. The aim of the current study is to investigate the types of parent marijuana messages that college students receive and the relationship between parent communication and students' marijuana attitudes and behaviors. Students (N = 506) completed a survey assessing marijuana approval, use, negative consequences, and parent communication. A factor analysis of parent communication items yielded three factors: risk communication, permissive communication, and marijuana use communication. Risk communication was the most common form of communication. In multivariate models, risk communication was associated with increased odds of a student remaining abstinent but not with frequency of marijuana use or negative consequences. Greater permissive communication was associated with more approving student attitudes, greater odds of non-abstinence, more frequent use in the past year, and more negative consequences. These findings highlight the need to consider the different types of messages parents deliver when designing interventions aimed at engaging parents in marijuana prevention efforts. Keywords Marijuana use; Parent communication; College; Marijuana consequencesMarijuana is the most commonly used recreational drug by college students in the USA (Johnston et al. 2013). Since 2006, marijuana use has increased by 35 %, and it is projected Correspondence to: Lucy E. Napper, Lucy.Napper@lehigh.edu. Compliance with Ethical StandardsThe universities' Institutional Review Boards approved all measures and procedures prior to data collection. Conflict of InterestThe authors declare that they have no competing interests.Ethical Approval All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.Informed Consent Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. HHS Public AccessAuthor manuscript Prev Sci. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2017 October 01.Published in final edited form as:Prev Sci. 2016 October ; 17(7): 882-891. doi:10.1007/s11121-016-0681-0. Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript Author Manuscriptto continue to increase due to various changes in its legal status (Johnston et al. 2013). Heavy marijuana use is associated with a number of negative academic outcomes, including memory problems, missing class, and poor academic performance (Buckner et al. 2012;Caldeira et al. 2008;Norberg et al. 2011). Given both the increase of marijuana use by college students and the potential negative consequences, it is important to identify and understand the social and environmental factors that contribute...

Objective The current study examined the extent to which negative affect moderates the relationships between distinct hookup motives and hookup consequences. Participants Data were collected from 271 heavy drinking undergraduate college students. Methods Students from three U.S. universities completed online surveys assessing hooking up related motives, behaviors, and consequences. Results The results showed that conformity motives to hookup and negative affect predicted hookup consequences. Furthermore, negative affect moderated the relationship between hooking up for relationship reasons and hookup consequences. Specifically, heightened motivation to hookup to secure a long-term relationship was associated with increased hookup consequences among students with high negative affect but decreased hookup consequences among students with low negative affect. Conclusions These findings highlight the role that motives and negative affect play in the prediction of negative hookup consequences. Moreover, the findings from the current study have the potential to inform prevention efforts designed to reduce hookup consequences.

The psychological impact of military deployment on nondeploying partners of service members is only recently gaining attention in the literature, with preliminary findings suggesting that partners of military service members experience significant mental health consequences of deployment, but with little work examining factors that could heighten or attenuate risk for maladjustment in response to deployment. The current study uses attachment theory as a guide to explore the unique and interactive effects of two factors likely to increase risk for maladjustment among nondeploying partners: attachment anxiety and trauma history. Participants (N = 86) completed assessments 2 weeks prior to and 2 weeks following their partners’ deployment departure, as well as 2 weeks following their partners’ return. Attachment anxiety and trauma history independently contributed to adjustment during and following the deployment, with partners high in either factor at greatest risk for maladjustment and partners high in both exhibiting the most linguistic signs of threat orientation. Further, low attachment anxiety was associated with better adjustment when trauma history was low or moderate, but not high; similarly, low trauma history was associated with better adjustment when attachment anxiety was at low or moderate, but not high. In terms of postdeployment adjustment, partners with less trauma history reported less distress. Somewhat surprisingly, among those with more trauma history, higher attachment anxiety was associated with less risk for maladjustment. We discuss these findings in terms of their implication for theory and prevention.

Adolescents are at risk for becoming victims or perpetrators for a variety of forms of dating violence, including cyber violence, physical violence, psychological abuse, and sexual abuse. Interestingly, a robust predictor of dating violence is adverse experiences during childhood; however, factors that could mitigate the risk of dating violence for those exposed to adversity have seldom been examined. Using the cumulative stress hypothesis as a lens, the current study examined severity of adverse experiences as a predictor of dating violence within a sample at risk for both victimization and perpetration of dating violence: An adolescent (12–17 years old; N = 137) sample who were receiving inpatient psychiatric treatment. First, the current study aimed to replicate previous findings to determine whether adversity predicted dating violence and whether this varied by gender. Then, the current study examined one factor that could mitigate the relation between adversity and dating violence—parental emotion validation. High rates of maternal emotion validation resulted in no relation between adversity and dating violence perpetration and victimization; however, the relation was present at average and low levels of maternal emotion validation. Next, by adding gender as an additional moderator to the model, we found that high rates of paternal emotion validation extinguished the relation between adversity and dating violence perpetration, but only for adolescent boys. This pattern was not found for maternal emotion validation. Interestingly, the relation between adversity and dating violence victimization did not vary as a function of maternal or paternal validation of emotion for either child gender. These findings are discussed in terms of their meaning within this sample, possible future directions, and their implications for the prevention of dating violence.