Alcohol Use and Abstinence throughout Adolescence: The Changing Contributions of Perceived Risk of Drinking, Opportunities to Drink, and Self-Control.

Objective: Adolescence is characterized by psychosocial and cognitive changes that can alter the perceived risk of negative effects of alcohol, opportunities to drink, and self-control. Few studies have investigated whether these factors change in their contribution to adolescent drinking over time. This study examined associations between perceived risk, opportunities to drink, self-control, and past-year drinking and investigated whether self-control buffers the effect of lower perceived risk and frequent drinking opportunities on the probability of past-year drinking. Method: Data from a four-wave longitudinal study (2015-2020) of 2,104 North Carolina adolescents (Mage = 12.36, SDage = 1.12, at Time 1) were used to assess changes in associations between self-control, perceived risk of drinking, and drinking opportunities on the frequency of past-year drinking. Hypotheses were tested using latent trajectory models. Results: At all timepoints, greater perceived risk, fewer drinking opportunities, and higher self-control were associated with drinking abstinence in the past year. Self-control buffered the impact of frequent drinking opportunities and lower perceived risk on the probability of alcohol use at Times 1-3. Conclusions: Despite expectations that adolescents' ability to navigate their environments improves as they age, associations between risk, protective factors, and past-year drinking were relatively stable over time. Nevertheless, self-control protected against frequent drinking opportunities and lower perceived risk. Strategies that support or relieve the need for self-control (e.g., situation modification) may protect against alcohol use throughout adolescence.

Identifying modifiable factors associated with psychological health in women experiencing infertility.

This study assessed the relationship between modifiable psychological variables and depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic growth in women experiencing infertility. U.S. women (N = 457) who identified as experiencing infertility completed standardized self-report measures of mindfulness, self-compassion, positive affect, intolerance of uncertainty, relationship satisfaction, experiential avoidance, depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic growth. Clinical and demographic characteristics (age, duration trying to conceive, miscarriage, and childlessness) did not predict depression or anxiety. Lower positive affect and higher experiential avoidance were associated with depression and anxiety. Lower self-compassion was associated with depression; higher intolerance of uncertainty was associated with anxiety. There were indirect effects of mindfulness on anxiety and depression via these variables. Future research should explore whether intervening on these factors reduces depressive and anxiety symptoms. Promoting mindfulness may have beneficial effects on symptoms via its downstream effects on multiple coping variables. Counterintuitively, posttraumatic growth was associated with higher intolerance of uncertainty and experiential avoidance.

The association between evening social media use and delayed sleep may be causal: Suggestive evidence from 120 million Reddit timestamps.

Public health officials and clinicians routinely advise social media users to avoid nighttime social media use due to the perception that this delays the onset of sleep and predisposes to the health risks of insufficient sleep. With some exceptions, the evidence behind this advice mostly derives from surveys identifying an association between self-reported social media usage and self-reported sleep patterns. In principle, these associations could alternatively be explained by users turning to social media to pass the time when they are otherwise having difficulty sleeping, or by individual differences that draw some people to frequent social media use, or by offline activities that overlap with both social media use and delayed sleep. To attempt to distinguish among these explanations, we leveraged estimated bedtimes from 44,000 Reddit users reported in a recent study and their 120 million posts to test whether the relationship between sleep and social media has properties suggestive of a causal relationship. We find that users are especially likely to be active on Reddit after their bedtime (and therefore awake) on nights that they posted to Reddit shortly before bedtime, especially if they posted multiple times or in high-engagement forums that night. Overall, this study lends additional support to the notion that there likely is some causal effect of evening social media use on delayed sleep onset.

Intervening on Social Comparisons on Social Media: Electronic Daily Diary Pilot Study.

BACKGROUND: Literature has underscored the dark aspects of social media use, including associations with depressive symptoms, feelings of social isolation, and diminished self-esteem. Social comparison, the process of evaluating oneself relative to another person, is thought to contribute to these negative experiences such that people with a stronger tendency to compare themselves with others are particularly susceptible to the detrimental effects of social media. Social media as a form of social connection and communication is nevertheless an inevitable-and arguably integral-part of life, particularly for young adults. Therefore, there is a need to investigate strategies that could alter the manner in which people interact with social media to minimize its detrimental effects and maximize the feelings of affiliation and connection. OBJECTIVE: This pilot study examined the feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness of a brief web-based intervention designed to alter engagement with social media and promote psychological well-being by encouraging social savoring as an alternative to social comparison. Social savoring was operationalized as experiencing joyful emotions related to the happiness of someone else's experiences (ie, feeling happy for someone else). METHODS: Following an intensive longitudinal design, 55 college students (mean age 19.29, SD 0.93 years; n=43, 78% women and n=23, 42% White) completed baseline measures (individual differences, psychological well-being, connectedness, and social media use) and then 14 days of daily surveys on their social media activity and well-being. On day 8, the group that was randomized to receive the intervention watched a video instructing them on the skill of social savoring and was asked to practice this skill during days 8 to 14. RESULTS: Overall, participants reported positive perceptions of the intervention. Participants who watched the intervention video reported significantly higher performance self-esteem (P=.02) at posttest than those in the control condition, after controlling for baseline levels. Participants also reported significantly higher state self-esteem (P=.01) on days in which they engaged in more social savoring while using social media, and the use of social savoring increased significantly (P=.01) over time, suggesting that participants found it helpful. Participants in both conditions reported significantly lower levels of social comparison (control: P=.01; intervention: P=.002) and higher levels of connectedness (control: P<.001; intervention: P=.001) at posttest than at baseline. CONCLUSIONS: Initial evidence from this pilot study suggests that a web-based social savoring intervention may help minimize the potentially harmful consequences of social media use, at least in some domains. Future work is needed to examine the effectiveness and acceptance of this intervention in different age groups and in clinical samples that are in part characterized by higher levels of comparison with others (eg, people with eating disorders).

Digital location tracking: A preliminary investigation of parents' use of digital technology to monitor their adolescent's location.

The emergence of digital technologies has changed the dynamic of parent-adolescent relationships. Parents can now use digital technologies to monitor their adolescent's physical location. Yet, to date, no known research has examined the extent to which digital location tracking occurs in parent-adolescent dyads, and how tracking links to adolescent adjustment. The current research examined digital location tracking in a large sample of adolescents (N = 729; Mage = 15.03). Overall, about half of parents and adolescents reported digital location tracking. Girls and younger adolescents were more likely to be tracked, and tracking was associated with greater externalizing problems and alcohol consumption; however, these associations were not robust across multiple informants and sensitivity analyses. Positive linkages with externalizing problems and cannabis use were in part contingent on age and positive parenting, with associations emerging for older adolescents and adolescents who report lower positive parenting. Older adolescents are increasingly striving for independence and autonomy, and adolescents who perceive lower positive parenting may view digital tracking as controlling and intrusive. However, results were not robust after statistical correction. This brief report is intended to serve as a preliminary investigation into digital location tracking, and future research is needed to determine the directionality of associations. Possible consequences of parental digital tracking require careful consideration by researchers in order to provide guidance on the best practices for engaging in digital monitoring while nurturing and respecting the parent-adolescent relationship. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Adjusting to the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States: The impact of disruptions on habits and changes in health behaviors.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a naturalistic test of whether pandemic-related disruptions weaken habits and undermine behavior stability. We hypothesized that better capacity to effortfully guide behavior (self-regulation) would buffer this effect and be associated with behavior stability and development of new habits to accomplish daily behaviors. A cross-sectional study of 416 MTurk workers recruited in April 2020 (Mage = 34.60, SD = 11.51) indicated that pandemic-related disruptions generally exceeded people's capacity to effortfully modify their behavior. Self-regulation related to the development of new habits and to lower likelihood that work productivity decreased. Self-regulation also protected against the effect of disruption on the likelihood that substance use increased. Besides these associations, self-regulation was largely unrelated to health-related behaviors and, in some instances, associated with poorer outcomes. These findings underscore the need to appreciate the impact of contextual disruptions in interpreting and promoting change in health-related behaviors.

Estimation of Bedtimes of Reddit Users: Integrated Analysis of Time Stamps and Surveys.

BACKGROUND: Individuals with later bedtimes have an increased risk of difficulties with mood and substances. To investigate the causes and consequences of late bedtimes and other sleep patterns, researchers are exploring social media as a data source. Pioneering studies inferred sleep patterns directly from social media data. While innovative, these efforts are variously unscalable, context dependent, confined to specific sleep parameters, or rest on untested assumptions, and none of the reviewed studies apply to the popular Reddit platform or release software to the research community. OBJECTIVE: This study builds on this prior work. We estimate the bedtimes of Reddit users from the times tamps of their posts, test inference validity against survey data, and release our model as an R package (The R Foundation). METHODS: We included 159 sufficiently active Reddit users with known time zones and known, nonanomalous bedtimes, together with the time stamps of their 2.1 million posts. The model's form was chosen by visualizing the aggregate distribution of the timing of users' posts relative to their reported bedtimes. The chosen model represents a user's frequency of Reddit posting by time of day, with a flat portion before bedtime and a quadratic depletion that begins near the user's bedtime, with parameters fitted to the data. This model estimates the bedtimes of individual Reddit users from the time stamps of their posts. Model performance is assessed through k-fold cross-validation. We then apply the model to estimate the bedtimes of 51,372 sufficiently active, nonbot Reddit users with known time zones from the time stamps of their 140 million posts. RESULTS: The Pearson correlation between expected and observed Reddit posting frequencies in our model was 0.997 on aggregate data. On average, posting starts declining 45 minutes before bedtime, reaches a nadir 4.75 hours after bedtime that is 87% lower than the daytime rate, and returns to baseline 10.25 hours after bedtime. The Pearson correlation between inferred and reported bedtimes for individual users was 0.61 (P<.001). In 90 of 159 cases (56.6%), our estimate was within 1 hour of the reported bedtime; 128 cases (80.5%) were within 2 hours. There was equivalent accuracy in hold-out sets versus training sets of k-fold cross-validation, arguing against overfitting. The model was more accurate than a random forest approach. CONCLUSIONS: We uncovered a simple, reproducible relationship between Reddit users' reported bedtimes and the time of day when high daytime posting rates transition to low nighttime posting rates. We captured this relationship in a model that estimates users' bedtimes from the time stamps of their posts. Limitations include applicability only to users who post frequently, the requirement for time zone data, and limits on generalizability. Nonetheless, it is a step forward for inferring the sleep parameters of social media users passively at scale. Our model and precomputed estimated bedtimes of 50,000 Reddit users are freely available.

Longitudinal and daily associations between adolescent self-control and digital technology use.

There is fear that adolescents have limited control over their digital technology use. The current research examines longitudinal (Study 1) and daily (Study 2) associations between U.S. adolescents' self-control and digital technological impairment and use. Using a large sample (N = 2,104; Wave 1: Mage = 12.36, 52% female, 57% economically disadvantaged, 48% racial minority), Study 1 tested how changes in adolescents' self-control and perceived technological impairment co-occur across time (between-person associations) and if self-control and perceived impairment are prospectively and bidirectionally associated with each other (within-person associations). There was evidence of between-person associations, in that poorer self-control and perceived technological impairment both increase over adolescence, and these increases are positively associated with each other. However, there was no evidence of prospective within-person associations. Using a subsample from Study 1 (N = 388), Study 2 found support for a between-person association for self-control and using digital technology for entertainment, in which adolescents who reported poorer self-control relative to their peers also engaged in greater digital technology use for entertainment. There was no robust support for within-person associations. These findings suggest that adolescents with poorer self-control may have established tendencies to experience greater technological impairment and use more digital technology for entertainment, but the lack of within-person associations indicate caution is needed for a cause-and-effect relation. Adolescents with existing poorer self-control may be more vulnerable to problematic digital technology use in a developmental period where digital technology is particularly rewarding, and intervention and prevention efforts should be geared toward these adolescents. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Experience of Succeeding and Failing at Self-Control: A Qualitative Analysis.

Despite the importance of emotions for learning and performance of future behaviors, few studies have attempted to qualitatively describe emotions that arise in response to self-control successes and failures. This study is the first qualitative analysis to examine the complexity of goals that give rise to self-control challenges of two types-initiation and inhibition-and the emotions that follow success and failure experiences. Thematic analysis revealed a sometimes blurred line between inhibition and initiation, and a variety of goals that challenge views that successful self-control is good and unsuccessful self-control is bad. Descriptions of self-control challenges and resulting experiences further uncovered distinctions and apparent emotional profiles characteristic of self-control dilemmas involving inhibition or initiation, suggesting that these two forms of self-control are not only theoretically but also experientially distinct.

Meta-analysis of early adolescent self-regulation interventions: Moderation by intervention and outcome type.

INTRODUCTION: Self-regulation has been identified as a highly promising target for interventions promoting broad wellbeing across development; however, there appear to be notable limitations in efficacy for early adolescents in particular. One possible reason is that the emotion regulation needs of youth have not been intentionally targeted in many interventions for this age group. The aim of this study is to advance understanding of how different intervention approaches defined from a clear theoretical model may impact different types of outcomes and with regard to different types of measures. METHODS: We conducted a systematic literature review of four databases using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines and identified 33 studies of early adolescents (aged 10-15) using five different intervention approaches that were methodologically rigorous (e.g., randomized controlled trial design with low risk of bias). Studies were conducted predominantly in North America (58%), and Western Europe (30%). RESULTS: A two-level mixed-effects meta-analysis indicated a small but significant overall intervention effect (Hedges g = 0.12). When examined by intervention type, effects were significant only for approaches focusing predominantly on emotion regulation (g = 0.20), which significantly improved behavioral outcomes as well as emotional outcomes. Approaches examining cognitive regulation, parent training, physical activity, and working memory did not differ significantly from zero. Across intervention types, outcomes demonstrated the largest effects for youth report of emotional distress. CONCLUSION: Overall, results suggest that emotion regulation may be a critically important self-regulation mechanism during early adolescence and demonstrates value in the use of applied theoretical frameworks to operationalize intervention approaches and outcomes.

Navigating Still Waters of Infertility: Role of Goal Features in Coping with a Thwarted Goal.

BACKGROUND: The infertility experience is often surrounded by frustration and discouragement associated with the thwarted goal to have a child. Though research has identified commonly used strategies to cope with infertility, this study is the first to examine how different goal attributes and processes associated with the experience of infertility relate to coping strategy use and psychological distress. METHOD: Women (N = 353) recruited from online support forums reported on the nature of their goal to have a child, their psychological distress, and their use of strategies to cope with the failure to achieve that goal. RESULTS: Women reported high striving toward a goal high in importance and commitment, coupled with high goal-related stress and feeling that achievement is blocked. Consistent with the notion that coping strategy use is specific to the features of the experience, no single goal attribute nor combination of attributes consistently accounted for coping strategy use, suggesting that the latter may be specific to the cognitions and processes of pursuit of the goal to have a child. With one exception, perceptions of impediment were better predictors of psychological distress than any level of perceived facilitators of goal pursuit, positing potential targets for future psychological interventions. CONCLUSION: Understanding how women cope with infertility may require a detailed conceptualization of their goal to have a child. In the present sample, dynamic processes and coping strategies that otherwise detract from success were generally beneficial by providing alternatives to the pursuit of a thwarted goal.

Reducing contingent self-worth: A defensive response to self-threats.

Previous research shows that people with high self-esteem cope with threats to the self by reducing the extent to which their self-worth is contingent on the threatened domain (Buckingham, Weber, & Sypher, 2012). The present studies tested the hypothesis that this is a defensive process. In support of this hypothesis, Study 1 (N = 160), showed that self-affirmation attenuates the tendency for people with high self-esteem to reduce their contingencies of self-worth following self-threat. Furthermore, Study 2 (N = 286), showed that this tendency was more prevalent among people with defensive self-esteem than among those with secure self-esteem. The present studies imply that reducing contingent self-worth after self-threat is a defensive process. We discuss implications for theories of contingent self-worth.