Motives for drinking are also of interest, both as predictors of high risk drinking in their own right and due to their associations with behavioral undercontrol/disinhibition. Coping motives (i.e., drinking to reduce negative affect) have been related to alcohol dependence diagnoses cross-sectionally and one year later in a community sample of adult drinkers (Carpenter and Hasin, 1999). In the above-mentioned prospective study examining a cohort of college students from ages 18-35 (Littlefield et al., 2010), changes in coping motives were found to mediate the aforementioned relationship between changes in impulsivity and changes in alcohol-related problems.
