We expect that development toward Negative Affect SUDs more specifically, rather than SUDs more generally, occurs during late childhood and is marked by three factors namely, positive expectations for the effects of alcohol and drug use, interpersonal skill deficits that lead to associations with deviant peers or to social withdraw and the desire to self-medicate, and coping motives for substance use. The first of these indices thus concerns the growing expectation that alcohol use will reduce distress associated with internalizing symptoms. Although younger children generally endorse more beliefs about the undesirable than positive or enhancing effects of alcohol, this balance of positive to negative beliefs changes both with age and drinking experience (Dunn & Goldman, 1998; O’Connor, Fite, Nowlin, & Colder, 2007). However, even in young children, some youth indicate that they hold such tension reduction or coping expectations for alcohol use even as they enter adolescence (as consistent with evidence in Colder et al., 1997 and Cooper, Frone, Russell, & Mudar, 1995). Such beliefs, as with any positive expectation for drinking, are predictive of greater alcohol use in adolescence
