Publications by authors named "Ashley Linden-Carmichael"

Background: The landscape of substance use behavior among young adults has observed rapid changes over time. Intensive longitudinal designs are ideal for examining and intervening in substance use behavior in real time but rely on high participant compliance in the study protocol, representing a significant challenge for researchers.

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the effect of including a personalized data dashboard (DD) in a text-based survey prompt on study compliance outcomes among college students participating in a 21-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study.

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  • The study investigates the relationship between college students' sense of belonging and their alcohol use, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting its significance as a protective factor for mental health.
  • Using data from a 21-day diary study involving over 2,000 students, the findings indicate that lower feelings of belonging correspond to reduced alcohol consumption on those days.
  • The research emphasizes the need for targeted public health strategies that consider varying impacts of belonging on alcohol use among different student demographics, particularly minoritized groups.
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Objective: Simultaneous use of alcohol and cannabis is prevalent among young adults and associated with heightened risk for harms. Individuals who engage in simultaneous use report a variety of types of use occasions and risk factors driving use occasions are unique and dynamic in nature. Intervention content may thus need to adapt to address differences across occasions.

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  • Ecological momentary assessments (EMA) are valuable for tracking young adults' substance use behaviors in real-time and identifying risk factors that can trigger interventions.
  • The study aims to improve compliance by comparing standard prompts for one group of participants with personalized messages and a data dashboard for another group.
  • This involves a 2-arm randomized controlled trial with participants engaged in daily assessments over 21 days, focusing on the effectiveness of the personalized dashboard in enhancing study engagement and compliance.*
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  • * Among alcohol users, higher negative affect variability is linked to more frequent drinking, while both positive and negative variability are connected to drinking more intensely.
  • * The study found no notable differences in affect variability between individuals who only use alcohol and those who also use cannabis, suggesting affect variability impacts alcohol use behavior universally.
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Co-use of alcohol and cannabis is prevalent and linked with heightened risk for substance-related harms. The current study investigated the role of substance-related pleasure as a reinforcing factor for co-use relative to alcohol or cannabis use. Specifically, we used data from a 21-day diary study of college students to examine day-level associations between co-use and self-reported substance-related pleasure (any, level of pleasure).

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Background: Whether emotional problems during childhood and adolescence are longitudinally associated with adult alcohol use behaviors is unclear. This study examined associations between developmental trajectories of emotional problems and early adult alcohol use behaviors, while considering co-occurring conduct problems, developmental change/timing, sex differences, and potential confounds.

Methods: Participants were from the Twins Early Development Study (analytic N = 19,908 individuals).

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Background: Young adults in the United States exhibit some of the highest rates of substance use compared to other age groups. Heavy and frequent substance use can be associated with a host of acute and chronic health and mental health concerns. Recent advances in ubiquitous technologies have prompted interest and innovation in using technology-based data collection instruments to understand substance use and associated harms.

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Expectancy theory supports alcohol expectancies, or the expected effects of drinking, as an important factor in alcohol use behaviors. Recent research supports that alcohol expectancies fluctuate daily, but scant research has examined specific types of expectancies and their associations with alcohol use at the daily level. Consequently, the present study examined (1) the daily association between select expectancies (i.

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Objectives: The cultural stress theory posits that immigrants experience a constellation of cultural stressors such as discrimination that could exacerbate alcohol- and other substance-related problems. Drawing on cultural stress theory, this study investigated the age-varying association between past-year discrimination and substance use disorders (SUDs) among Latin American immigrants aged 18-60 and whether childhood family support moderated the above association.

Method: We used data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions-III (NESARC-III) among adults aged 18-60 who identified as a Latin American immigrant ( = 3,049; 48% female).

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Objective: Emotions play a critical role in health risk behaviors, including substance use. However, current research often focuses exclusively on average levels of positive and negative affect, neglecting the complexity of daily emotional patterns. By capturing multiple dimensions of affect, including arousal and discrete states, we can improve our understanding of proximal predictors of substance use.

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Subjective effects generally describe the feelings one has when consuming substances. There are several tools available for measuring alcohol-related subjective effects but there are reasons to believe that effects are interpreted differently across participants. The assessment of alcohol-related subjective effects is further complicated by the fact that many people use other substances with alcohol, including cannabis.

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The rise in drug overdoses and harms associated with the use of more than one substance has led to increased use of the term "polysubstance use" among researchers, clinicians, and public health officials. However, the term retains no consistent definition across contexts. The current authors convened from disciplines including sociology, epidemiology, neuroscience, and addiction psychiatry to propose a recommended definition of polysubstance use.

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  • This study looked at how people feel and how it relates to how much alcohol they drink.
  • Researchers found that people do not drink more when they’re feeling sad or upset, but they drink more when they're feeling happy.
  • The results are important because they challenge the idea that people drink mainly to cope with negative feelings, and now researchers want to look deeper into this topic.
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Introduction: Alcohol use has been linked to impairment in both short- and long-term measures of objective memory. However, limited research has investigated the association between alcohol use and subjective memory in everyday life. The study purpose was to investigate within- and between-person associations between daily alcohol use and prospective (i.

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Time-varying effect modeling (TVEM), a statistical technique for modeling dynamic patterns of change, presents new opportunities to study biobehavioral health processes. TVEM is particularly useful when applied to intensive longitudinal data (ILD) because it permits highly flexible modeling of outcomes over continuous time, as well as of associations between variables and moderation effects. TVEM coupled with ILD is ideal for the study of addiction.

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Background: Blackout drinking, or alcohol-induced memory loss during a drinking occasion, is associated with additional negative alcohol-related outcomes. Brief motivational interventions targeting higher-risk alcohol use behavior have largely ignored blackout drinking. Including personalized information on blackout drinking could maximize intervention impact.

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  • * Using data from the LONGSCAN sample, three profiles emerged: Low Resilience, Average Resilience, and High Resilience, with no significant differences in childhood maltreatment characteristics across these groups.
  • * The research highlights that those with High Resilience are less likely to engage in polysubstance use, suggesting that fostering individual resilience could be a key strategy in preventing substance use issues in at-risk youth.
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Introduction: Blackout drinking, or alcohol-induced memory loss during at least some part of a drinking occasion, is common among young adults and associated with negative alcohol-related consequences. One potential unique effect of blackout drinking episodes could be prolonged, general difficulties forming new memories through impairments in encoding, storage, or retrieval. The current study examined preliminary associations between blackout drinking and self-reported everyday cognitive functioning (i.

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  • Child maltreatment significantly increases the risk of developing substance use disorders (SUD) during emerging adulthood (ages 18-25).
  • The study utilized time-varying effect models to analyze data from 5,194 emerging adults, revealing that the link between maltreatment and SUD is strongest at younger ages, with maltreated individuals having three times higher odds of reporting SUD in the past year.
  • The findings indicate that prevention strategies should consider age, sex, racial-ethnic differences, and maltreatment types to be more effective in targeting emerging adults rather than just focusing on adolescents.
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Simultaneous use of alcohol and cannabis or marijuana ("SAM") use is prevalent among young adults and associated with adverse outcomes. Impulsivity is a key construct associated with alcohol and other substance use in this age group, but scant work has considered the role of individual facets of impulsivity on SAM use. The present study compared latent profiles defined by facets of impulsivity (negative urgency, lack of perseverance, lack of premeditation, sensation seeking, and positive urgency) and examined whether profiles were associated with recent SAM use relative to alcohol without cannabis use.

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: Prevalence of alcohol and marijuana use is highest in young adulthood and an increasing number of young adults report simultaneous alcohol and marijuana (SAM) use, which is consistently linked with numerous negative consequences. To better understand reasons for engaging in SAM use and to refine measurement of subjective effects of SAM use, this study aimed to identify (1) how young adults describe subjective experiences during a SAM use occasion and (2) how language describing subjective effects changes as a function of level of alcohol and marijuana use. : Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), 323 participants (53.

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Background: Substance use and use disorders in the United States have had significant and devastating impacts on individuals and communities. This escalating substance use crisis calls for urgent and innovative solutions to effectively detect and provide interventions for individuals in times of need. Recent mobile health (mHealth)-based approaches offer promising new opportunities to address these issues through ubiquitous devices.

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Purpose: The co-morbidity of binge eating and heavy drinking (BE + HD) is a serious concern due to the high prevalence rates and associated elevated severity. Clarifying the momentary factors that increase risk for binge eating and heavy drinking among BE + HD is important for expanding theoretical models of BE + HD and informing treatment recommendations. The current study used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to compare the momentary processes maintaining binge eating between BE + HD and individuals with binge eating only (BE-only) and to identify the momentary risk factors for binge eating episodes and heavy drinking episodes among BE + HD.

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