Depression, Environmental Reward, Coping Motives and Alcohol Consumption During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background. Increases in the incidence of psychological distress and alcohol use during the COVID-19 pandemic have been predicted. Environmental reward and self-medication theories suggest that increased distress and greater social/environmental constraints during COVID-19 could result in increases in depression and drinking to cope with negative affect. The current study had two goals: (1) to clarify the presence and direction of changes in alcohol use and related outcomes after the introduction of COVID-19 social distancing requirements, and; (2) to test hypothesized mediation models to explain individual differences in alcohol use during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods. Participants (n = 1127) were U.S. residents recruited for participation in an online survey. The survey included questions assessing environmental reward, depression, COVID-19-related distress, drinking motives, and alcohol use outcomes (alcohol use; drinking motives; alcohol demand, and solitary drinking). Outcomes were assessed for two timeframes: the 30 days prior to state-mandated social distancing (‘pre-social-distancing’), and the 30 days after the start of state-mandated social distancing (‘post-social-distancing’). Results. Depression severity, coping motives, and frequency of solitary drinking were significantly greater post-social-distancing relative to pre-social-distancing. Conversely, environmental reward and other drinking motives (social, enhancement, and conformity) were significantly lower post-social distancing compared to pre-social-distancing. Time spent drinking and frequency of binge drinking were greater post-social-distancing compared to pre-social-distancing, whereas typical alcohol quantity/frequency were not significantly different between timeframes. Indices of alcohol demand were variable with regard to change. Mediation analyses suggested a significant indirect effects of reduced environmental reward with drinking quantity/frequency via increased depressive symptoms and coping motives, and a significant indirect effect of COVID-related distress with alcohol quantity/frequency via coping motives for drinking. Discussion. Results provide early evidence regarding the relation of psychological distress with alcohol consumption and coping motives during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, results largely converged with predictions from self-medication and environmental reinforcement theories. Future research will be needed to study prospective associations among these outcomes.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it