Now is the time for reward! The developmental relationship between cognitive-motivational factors and adolescent substance use

The aims of this thesis were to examine the interaction between environmental and cognitive predictors in the onset and escalation of alcohol use, the role of aspects of impulsivity and their relation to onset of substance use, the role of executive functions and their relation to the onset of alcohol use, whether these aspects of impulsivity prospectively relate to alcohol-specific cognitive biases, and what the developmental relation is between cognitive biases and alcohol use in a general, non-heavy-drinking population of Dutch young adolescents. We examined these research questions using data from four time waves over two years.
We concluded that both risk-associated personality and parental rules each individually predicted onset and escalation of alcohol use among Dutch adolescents, without evidence for the expected interaction. It was found that self-report measures of sensation seeking prospectively predicted early onset of all types of substance use, but behavioral measures of impulsivity did not. We demonstrated that low scores on executive functioning predicted early onset of drinking. Furthermore, low scores on working memory predicted early onset of binge drinking. We found that while high scores on attentional bias predicted greater future alcohol use, there was no indication that alcohol use or impulsivity, or their interaction, predicted changes in cognitive bias. Finally, we found that while the intercept of approach bias was positively associated with the intercept of alcohol use, there were no significant associations between changes in either factor. Furthermore, there was no evidence of moderation of these associations by working memory.