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Category: Project

Description: Urgency is a personality trait quantifying individual differences in impulsive behaviors driven by intense emotions and is hypothesized to moderate associations between affect and alcohol use. However, this hypothesis has received inconsistent support in studies that repeatedly sample individuals in their natural environment. Although cannabis use is theorized to serve the same emotion regulation function as alcohol use, no research has tested the hypothesis that urgency moderates the associations between affect and cannabis use in daily diary and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) research. Clarifying the role that urgency potentially plays in the development of problematic substance use in everyday life is critical to the development of targeted prevention and treatment interventions. In this Registered Report, we will test an exhaustive list of affect dimensions × trait- and state-level urgency interactions predicting alcohol and cannabis use in a large sample (n = 500) of young adults who use both substances regularly. In this way, we aim to provide a conclusive answer to the question whether urgency moderates daily associations of negative and positive affect with alcohol and cannabis use in EMA data. Five-hundred young adults (stratified by age and sex) completed five short EMA surveys per day for 32 days across eight weekends (Thursday-Sunday).