Guilt and Expressive Writing for Reducing Alcohol Use in College Students

Plain-language summary

This research seeks to evaluate expressive writing as a novel intervention for problem drinking among college students. The vast majority of individually focused brief interventions targeting college drinking have focused on personalized feedback approaches and recent innovations have largely been limited to finer distinctions of these, which require assessment and programming for implementation. The present research proposes expressive writing as a novel alternative, which has been used extensively in other domains but not as an alcohol intervention strategy. H1a: Participants writing about negative drinking events will show reduced drinking and drinking-related negative consequences relative to students in the neutral control group. H1b: Participants writing about distressing non-alcohol events will show increased psychological wellbeing relative to students in the neutral control group. H1c: Participants writing about negative drinking events will show reduced drinking and consequences compared with an empirically-supported brief intervention (i.e., PNF). This is an exploratory hypothesis. H2a: Alcohol narratives will have stronger effects on alcohol outcomes relative to distress narratives. H2b: Alcohol guilt narratives will have the strongest effect on alcohol outcomes relative to all other conditions. H3a: Expression of guilt, assessed by self-report and by content coding with LIWC, will mediate intervention effects on drinking outcomes. H3b: Change thought, assessed by LIWC coding, will mediate intervention effects on drinking.

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