Twelve Steps, Two Factors: Coping Strategies Moderate the Association Between Craving and Daily 12-Step Use in a College Recovery Community.

BACKGROUND: Affiliating with 12-step groups appears to reduce relapse risk. By relying on between-person designs, extant research has been unable to examine daily mechanisms through which 12-step group affiliation contributes to recovery. OBJECTIVES: To examine the daily use and factor structure of the 12 steps and intrapersonal predictors and moderators of 12-step use. To determine whether the 12 steps were used in response to daily craving and, if so, which steps and in what contexts. METHODS: Data comprised 1304 end-of-day diary data entries from 55 young adults collected in 2008 from members of a college recovery community, combined with person-level baseline measures. Exploratory factor analysis examined the factor structure, and multi-level models examined both day-level and person-level predictors and moderators of step use, including meeting attendance, drug and alcohol dependence, social support, and coping strategies. RESULTS: Analyses produced two factors: Everyday steps, comprising surrender and maintenance steps, and action steps. Moderation analyses revealed that only action steps were significantly associated with craving, suggesting that craving can spur their use, but only among individuals pursuing certain general strategies for coping with stress: Separate median-split models produced significant associations between craving and action steps only among individuals high in avoidance, high in support-seeking, and/or low in problem-solving. Conclusions/Importance: This is the first study to empirically discern a 2-factor structure underlying the 12 steps, and to show that the two sets of steps are used in different contexts. The study also illustrates the value of person-centered approaches to recovery research and practice.

Transactions Between Substance Use Intervention, the Oxytocin Receptor (OXTR) Gene, and Peer Substance Use Predicting Youth Alcohol Use.

This study investigated the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) gene's moderation of associations between exposure to a substance misuse intervention, average peer substance use, and adolescents' own alcohol use during the 9th-grade. OXTR genetic risk was measured using five single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and peer substance use was based on youths' nominated closest friends' own reports of alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana use, based on data from the PROSPER project. Regression models revealed several findings. First, low OXTR risk was linked to affiliating with friends who reported less substance use in the intervention condition but not the control condition. Second, affiliating with high substance-using friends predicted youth alcohol risk regardless of OXTR risk or intervention condition. Third, although high OXTR risk youth in the intervention condition who associated with low substance-using friends reported somewhat higher alcohol use than comparable youth in the control group, the absolute level of alcohol use among these youth was still among the lowest in the sample.

Predicting High School Minority Adolescents' Drinking from Their Exposure to White Schoolmates: Differences and Similarities among Hispanic, Black, and Asian U.S. Adolescents.

White students' drinking may constitute a risk factor for drinking among same-school minority adolescents. Our study examined data from 14,986 ethnic minority American high school students (56% female, mean age = 15.6). Models examined associations between school-level White student drinking and same-school Black, Hispanic, and Asian adolescents' drinking, as well as whether schools' proportions of White students and friendships with White schoolmates moderated these associations. Both school-level White students' drinking and minority students' friendships with White schoolmates were associated with levels of minority student drinking. But these associations were dependent upon levels of other study variables. In particular, there were higher associations between school-level risk factors and minorities' drinking when minority adolescents had high proportions of Whites among their friends.

An Idiographic Examination of Day-to-Day Patterns of Substance Use Craving, Negative Affect and Tobacco Use among Young Adults in Recovery.

Psychological constructs, such as negative affect and substance use cravings that closely predict relapse, show substantial intra-individual day-to-day variability. This intra-individual variability of relevant psychological states combined with the "one day of a time" nature of sustained abstinence warrant a day-to-day investigation of substance use recovery. This study examines day-to-day associations among substance use cravings, negative affect, and tobacco use among 30 college students in 12-step recovery from drug and alcohol addictions. To account for individual variability in day-to-day process, it applies an idiographic approach. The sample of 20 males and 10 females (mean age = 21) was drawn from members of a collegiate recovery community at a large university. Data were collected with end-of-day data collections taking place over an average of 26.7 days. First-order vector autoregression models were fit to each individual predicting daily levels of substance use cravings, negative affect, and tobacco use from the same three variables one day prior. Individual model results demonstrated substantial inter-individual differences in intra-individual recovery process. Based on estimates from individual models, cluster analyses were used to group individuals into two homogeneous subgroups. Group comparisons demonstrate distinct patterns in the day-to-day associations among substance use cravings, negative affect, and tobacco use, suggesting the importance of idiographic approaches to recovery management and that the potential value of focusing on negative affect or tobacco use as prevention targets depends on idiosyncratic processes.

Harnessing the Undiscovered Resource of Student Research Projects.

This article suggests that undergraduate research can help advance the science of psychology. We introduce a hypothetical "question-list paradigm" as a mechanism to do this. Each year, thousands of undergraduate projects are completed as part of the educational experience. Although many of these studies may not contain sufficient contributions for publication, they provide a good test of the replicability of established findings across populations at different institutions and geographic locations. Thus, these projects could meet the needs of recent calls for increased replications of psychological studies while simultaneously benefiting the student researchers, their instructors, and the field in general.

Understanding the association between adolescent marijuana use and later serious drug use: gateway effect or developmental trajectory?

Because marijuana use often precedes the use of other psychoactive substances, it has been characterized as a gateway to these other substances. The present study used data from both monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Youth (Add Health) to examine the "gateway effect" role of earlier marijuana on later hard drug use. Difference score analyses reveal that within-pair differences in earlier marijuana use, controlling for differences in earlier hard drug use, and peer marijuana use predicted later within-pair hard drug use differences for DZ twin pairs. In contrast, earlier differences in marijuana use among MZ twin pairs did not predict later hard drug use differences. Rather than supporting the interpretation that earlier marijuana use "triggers" later hard drug use, these results suggest that the longitudinal pattern of drug use that has been interpreted as the "gateway effect" might be better conceptualized as a genetically influenced developmental trajectory.

Sources of exposure to smoking and drinking friends among adolescents: a behavioral-genetic evaluation.

Substance-using friends expose adolescents to models of, and opportunities for, substance use that may lead to its initiation or reinforce existing use. Using genetically informative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (P. S. Bearman, J. Jones, & J. R. Udry, 1998), the authors examined whether adolescents' exposure to friends' tobacco smoking and alcohol drinking was better explained by family-social or genetic influences. To conduct analyses, the authors constructed substance use exposure scores for adolescent siblings from the responses of siblings' nominated friends to self-reported smoking and drinking items. Using behavioral-genetic analyses of these substance use exposure scores, the authors estimated that 64% of the variance in adolescents' exposure to friends who smoke and drink could be explained by genetic influences, whereas shared environmental influences were zero. These results provide evidence of active, evocative, or both types of gene-environment correlations. Genetic factors can influence the formation of friendships with substance-using peers, thereby contributing to adolescents' exposure to substance use behaviors.

The moderation of genetic and shared-environmental influences on adolescent drinking by levels of parental drinking.

OBJECTIVE: Research has consistently shown an association between levels of parental drinking and adolescent alcohol use. Different mechanisms offered to explain this association include environmental mechanisms such as social learning and biological mechanisms such as genetic transmission. To integrate these perspectives, this study examines the moderation of environmental and genetic influences on adolescent alcohol use by parental drinking behaviors. METHOD: The data used were 1,833 pairs drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health's monozygotic twins, dizygotic twins, fill-sibling and half-sibling pairs. Analyses used Defries-Fulker (DF) models to estimate genetic and shared environmental influences and to evaluate the potential moderation of these influences by household parental drinking. RESULTS: Full sample results revealed that genetic influences (h2 = 0.46, p < .05) were significant but that shared environmental influences (c2 = 0.10, p > .05) were not. Separate DF analyses for male, female and mixed-gender pairs found the magnitude of genetic and shared environmental influences on adolescents to be similar across male and female pairs. Results for mixed-gender pairs, however, were ambiguous. Extended DF models examining interactions between parental drinking and the expression of genetic and shared environmental influences found parental drinking was associated with a higher expression of genetic influences among male pairs but not among female or mixed-gender pairs. CONCLUSIONS: The main inferences to be drawn are that, at least for male adolescents, genetic influences on drinking appear to be potentiated by exposure to parental drinking.

The moderation of adolescent-to-peer similarity in tobacco and alcohol use by school levels of substance use.

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study examined the impact of school-level smoking and drinking on adolescent-peer similarity for smoking and drinking. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that adolescent-peer similarity was significantly moderated by school-level substance use for both tobacco and alcohol use. For tobacco, similarity between adolescent and peer use increased from .18 in the lower quartile of tobacco-using schools to .44 in the upper quartile of tobacco-using schools. Corresponding similarities for alcohol use ranged from .25 to .34. These results suggest that schools with relatively few substance-using peers provide less opportunities for adolescents to pick niches that expose them to risk factors that correspond to their own substance-use behaviors.