This project proposes to examine the role of positive urgency (i.e., a tendency to act rashly under extreme positive emotions) for alcohol-related risk-taking in a well-controlled laboratory setting and using a large neuroimaging dataset from the Nathan Kline Institute?s Rockland Project. Despite that there is a robust relationship between positive urgency and risk-taking, how positive urgency increases positive emotion-based alcohol-related risk-taking via behavioral and neuroscientific mechanisms is not well understood, which limits attempts to reduce these adverse effects. The central hypotheses of this project are that 1) positive urgency is associated with increased alcohol-related risk-taking because it interacts with positive emotions and alcohol consumption to enhance positive emotions, which drive subsequent risk-taking and [2) positive urgency is associated with the modular organization (e.g., how different brain nodes work together or separately across time) of large-scale functional brain networks, which influences positive emotion-based risk-taking. The proposed study will use a novel positive emotion induction with alcohol administration complemented with sophisticated whole-brain data analyses to examine behavioral and neuroscientific evidence underlying positive urgency. Further, the environment for research training is ideal due to close and ongoing collaboration amongst Indiana University ? Purdue University Indianapolis, the Indiana Alcohol Research Center, and the IU Health Neuroscience Center of Excellence. The training plan is carefully designed to provide training in research methods, ethics, and professional development issues that will aid the transition to an independent research career.] The main study hypotheses are: 1) Positive urgency will be more strongly associated with risk-taking in the positive (vs. neutral) emotion induction condition. 2) Positive urgency will be more strongly associated with risk-taking in the alcohol (vs. non-alcoholic beverage) consumption condition. 3) The relationship between positive urgency and risk-taking will be mediated by increased positive emotion changes in positive emotion induction condition, and the relationship between positive urgency and positive emotion change will be moderated by alcohol (i.e., more change in the alcohol vs. non-alcohol condition). [4) Positive urgency will be associated with modular flexibility of salience network-related nodes. 5) Positive urgency will be associated with greater cohesion strength in salience network-related nodes. 6) Positive urgency will mediate the relationship between whole brain modularity patterns and alcohol-related problems.] Successful completion of this work has a strong potential to aid the development of positive urgency-based prevention and intervention for alcohol use that incorporates behavioral and neuroscientific evidence of positive urgency and inform lay public, health care providers, and researchers alike of the importance of considering positive emotion, integral for positive urgency to operate, as an equally important factor as negative emotion for alcohol-related problems.
Positive urgency, defined as the tendency to act rashly under extreme positive emotions, is a facet of impulsivity highly associated with alcohol-related risk-taking; however, how positive urgency increases alcohol- related risk-taking is not well understood, which limits attempts to reduce these adverse effects. The proposed research will 1) empirically test a model in which positive urgency increase subsequent risk-taking under the influence of positive emotions and alcohol consumption, and [2) identify positive urgency-related modular organization of large-scale functional brain networks.] Should the hypotheses be supported, results of the study would aid future research incorporating the positive urgency-based behavioral and neural evidence to intervene on alcohol-related problems, and inform lay public, health care providers, and researchers concerning the role of positive urgency on alcohol-related risk-taking under extreme positive emotions.
