Further, there is evidence that some college students drink heavily to celebrate and to enhance positive moods, and that such drinking is associated with negative consequences [15, 16], thus implicating the role of positive affect in the risk process. For that reason, we believe that positive urgency, not negative urgency, may be the relevant risk factor for high quantity and problematic consumption among college students. There is empirical support for this hypothesis, in that positive urgency relates to college student problem drinking cross-sectionally [20, 25]. The theory underlying this hypothesis is spelled out more fully in [30]. It seems likely to us that negative urgency may play a more important role than positive urgency for individuals in other contexts (e.g., participating in a war, going through a divorce), but we did not study that possibility in this research.
