Chunk #7 — The role of romantic relationship status in pathways of risk for emerging adult alcohol use — Parental Alcohol Problems, Romantic Relationship Status, and Alcohol Use
Above and beyond these direct effects, parental alcohol use disorder or problems are also hypothesized to have indirect effects on offspring romantic relationship status and subsequent alcohol use. As shown in Figure 1, we consider two potential pathways for understanding the links from parental alcohol problems to romantic relationship status and eventually alcohol use: a deviance proneness pathway, and a positive affect regulation pathway (Sher et al., 2005). We selected these two etiological pathways for the present study over two others described by Sher et al. (2005) (i.e., the negative affect regulation pathway and the pharmacological vulnerability pathway) in view of their potential relevance for understanding how romantic relationship status may be related to alcohol risk factors and subsequent alcohol use in an emerging adult sample. As detailed in the next two sections, we selected conduct problems and positive urgency as markers of the deviance proneness and positive affect regulation pathways, respectively.
