Mocktails or cocktails? Having a sense of purpose in life can keep binge drinking at bay
A new study reveals that having a sense of purpose in daily life can
influence college students' decisions on day-to-day alcohol consumption

Date:
January 31, 2023
Source:
University of Pennsylvania
Summary:
A new study reveals that having a sense of purpose in daily life
can influence college students' decisions on day-to-day alcohol
consumption.


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FULL STORY ========================================================================== Heavy alcohol use is common among college students -- and as a
consequence, it puts young adults at risk for a wide range of health
issues, from cardiovascular disease to cancer. Day in and day out,
college students are bombarded with cues to drink, whether that's seeing
a group of friends toast at a party or celebrating after an exam.


========================================================================== Using functional MRI (fMRI) scanning technology, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Dartmouth College
examined the relationship between these cues, alcohol craving, and
alcohol consumption.

They found that having a strong sense of purpose in life decreases the temptation to consume alcohol to excess among some social drinkers.

Why purpose in life? Lead author Yoona Kang, a research director of
the Communication Neuroscience Lab at the Penn's Annenberg School for Communication, is deeply interested in the impact of purpose in life
on health.

Her previous research has found that having a strong life purpose --
the sense that your life is guided by personally meaningful values and
goals -- is associated with many health benefits, including easing the loneliness of COVID- 19 isolation and reducing the effort it takes to
make healthy choices.

"Values and purposes can have powerful effects on how people think and
behave," Kang says. "And what's interesting about this study is that
we asked participants, 'How much sense of purpose in life do you feel
right now?' Because your level of purpose can fluctuate day by day."
Craving alcohol For this study, Kang and colleagues charted the behavior
and attitudes of 54 healthy college students, with daily surveys over
the course of a month. Once a day, participants answered questions about
their current level of purpose in life -- and every morning and evening
they reported how much they craved and consumed alcohol.

"We focused on craving because it is one of the strongest predictors of
actual drinking. If you crave, then you're more likely to drink," Kang
says. "But just because you crave alcohol doesn't mean that you're going
to go out and drink, so we wanted to know what's nudging these social
drinkers into drinking when they crave alcohol." The student volunteers
also received fMRI brain scans, which gave a real-time picture of their
brain activity while they were exposed to alcohol cues, like photos of
beer, wine, and liquor or photos of people toasting at a party.

Researchers analyzed the participants' brain activity within the ventral striatum, the area of the brain previously associated with reward and
craving.

Individuals whose brains showed greater activity when they saw alcohol
cues - - people with higher neural alcohol cue reactivity -- were more
likely to drink after craving alcohol.

When this data was matched with life purpose data, Kang and colleagues
found something interesting: These neurally sensitive drinkers did not necessarily drink more if they were feeling a strong life purpose when
they craved alcohol.

And if they felt less purposeful? They were more likely to drink heavily
after a craving for alcohol.

Further implications This finding opens the door to discovering new
strategies to discourage binge drinking in college students, especially
those with higher neural cue reactivity, not by talking about drinking specifically, but by helping students focus on their mission, purpose,
and values. Kang suggests that future research could test interventions
used in other purposes in life and related studies - - strategies like reflecting on what matters to you or making positive wishes for other
people.

While the researchers caution that further testing would be needed
to determine whether the findings would generalize to non-college
populations, they note that many studies point to the strong link between purpose in life and health behavior across diverse populations.

And Kang underlines the importance of studying college
populations. "College students are in a formative time in their lives
where they are learning the norms around alcohol use and setting their
own habits that will affect their health later in life," she says. "So,
I think there's a lot of preventive values in studying alcohol use in
college populations." Research was funded by the Army Research Office;
Hopelab Foundation; and Mind and Life Institute.

* RELATED_TOPICS
o Health_&_Medicine
# Healthy_Aging # Teen_Health #
Medical_Education_and_Training # Birth_Defects
o Mind_&_Brain
# Alcoholism # Addiction # Educational_Psychology #
Social_Psychology
* RELATED_TERMS
o Alcoholism o Macroeconomics o Fetal_alcohol_spectrum_disorder
o Anatomy o Methanol o Blood_alcohol_content o UV_index o
Circadian_rhythm_sleep_disorder

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Pennsylvania. Original written by Hailey Reissman. Note: Content may be edited for style
and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Yoona Kang, Danielle Cosme, David Lydon‐Staley, Jeesung
Ahn, Mia
Jovanova, Faustine Corbani, Silicia Lomax, Ovidia Stanoi, Victor
Strecher, Peter J. Mucha, Kevin Ochsner, Dani S. Bassett, Emily
B. Falk.

Purpose in life, neural alcohol cue reactivity and daily alcohol
use in social drinkers. Addiction, 2022; 117 (12): 3049 DOI:
10.1111/add.16012 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230131183126.htm

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