Brief Online Negative Affect Focused Functional Imagery Training Improves 2-Week Drinking Outcomes in Hazardous Student Drinkers: a Pilot Randomised Controlled Trial

Abstract

Background Negative affect plays an important role in motivating problematic alcohol use. Consequently, training imagery-based adaptive responses to negative affect could reduce problematic alcohol use. The current study tested whether personalised online functional imagery training (FIT) to utilise positive mental imagery in response to negative affect would improve drinking outcomes in hazardous negative affect drinking students. Method Participants were 52 hazardous student drinkers who drink to cope with negative affect. Participants in the active group (n = 24) were trained online over 2 weeks to respond to personalised negative drinking triggers by retrieving a personalised adaptive strategy they might use to mitigate negative affect, whereas participants in the control group (n = 28) received standard risk information about binge drinking at university. Measures of daily drinking quantity, drinking motives, self-efficacy and use of protective behavioural strategies were obtained at baseline and 2 weeks follow-up. Results There were three significant interactions between group and time in a per-protocol analysis: the active intervention group showed increased self-efficacy of control over negative affect drinking and control over alcohol consumption and decreased social drinking motives from baseline to 2-week follow-up, relative to the control intervention group. There were no effects on drinking frequency. Conclusion These findings provide initial evidence that online training to respond to negative affect drinking triggers by retrieving mental imagery of adaptive strategies can improve drinking-related outcomes in hazardous, student, negative affect drinkers. The findings support the utility of FIT interventions for substance use.

A sex- and gender-based analysis of alcohol treatment intervention research involving youth: A methodological systematic review

“…In 64 of the studies (74.4%), the authors did not discuss whether sex or gender were relevant to their hypothesis or analysis [33,[35][36][37][38][39][40][41][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][58][59][60]62,93,[95][96][97][106][107][108][109]111,[113][114][115][116]118]. Half of the 86 studies in the sample (n = 43, 50%) did not mention sex or gender in their discussion sections, neither as variables which were significant or relevant to their findings, nor as factors that they explicitly featured in their recommendations for practice or policy based on their findings [33,35,39,41,[47][48][49]…”

“…Fifty-four (62.8%) of the 86 included studies inaccurately used sex-specific terminology to describe participants' gender identities by stating that the participants' genders were male and female (rather than men and women) [34][35][36]40,42,[44][45][46][47]49,50,[52][53][54][55][56]58,59,[61][62][63]67,[69][70][71][72]74,75,[77][78][79][81][82][83]86,87,[89][90][91][94][95][96][97]101,105,[108][109][110][111][114]…”

“…Eighteen (20.9%) of the studies used self-reporting instruments to collect the sexes of their participants and the articles neither specified whether the participants were offered options beyond male or female, nor whether participants were asked whether they had a variation in their sex development/ were intersex. The articles also did not clearly indicate whether participants were asked specifically for their at-birth sex assignments (for example, as compared to their legal sexes, which may be different) [50,51,59,73,74,78,81,83,85,90,[97][98][99][100]102,103,106,107]. Ten of these 18 studies were found in the previous section above to have accurately used sex terminology [51,73,85,[98][99][100]102,103,106,107]; however, information about the self-reporting measures were not provided so it is not possible to determine whether sex was accurately measured since the sex terms male and female can be used to describe both at-birth assignment and legal sex, and since neither sex assignment nor legal sex is sufficient to ascertain anatomy or physiology.…”

Applied imagery for motivation: a person-centred model

“…In partnership with several institutions, there are ongoing FIT projects working in and outside sport (e.g., Shuai et al, 2021), in domains such as health, education, business and the military, collectively using FIT and the AIM model with the focus on positive sustained behaviour change. Furthermore, the FIT programme is continuing to develop resources (similar to that of MI) to support the training of practitioners from a wide variety of applied settings, ensuring high fidelity levels through industry, including offering free training for early career researchers where possible.…”

Drinking to Cope is Uniquely Associated with Less Specific and Bleaker Future Goal Generation in Young Hazardous Drinkers

“…Nevertheless, there is evidence that training increased capacity to represent future goals/events may play a role in promoting recovery from substance use problems. For instance, training individuals to vividly imagine positive future events has been shown to reduce demand and craving for cigarettes in heavy smokers (Athamneh et al, 2021), cannabis use in cannabis users (Sofis et al, 2021), alcohol demand in adults with alcohol use disorders (Meshesha et al, 2020), and selfreported drinking to cope with negative affect in hazardous student drinkers (Shuai et al, 2021(Shuai et al, , 2022. The implication is that goal generation is not just an epiphenomenon, but may play a key role in substance use to cope and substance use problems.…”