Tracking Mood: The Effects of Daily Mood Tracking VAS on Alcohol Consumption in Adult Heavy Drinkers

Overview

The study aims to investigate the effects that mood tracking may have on the alcohol consumption of adults who consume more than 20 UK units of alcohol per week, classifying as high-risk drinkers. The intervention group will track their mood on a daily basis with a visual analogue scale, while the control group will report their daily time spent online. The hypothesis, based on a series of prior pilot studies on alcohol tracking methods, is that mood tracking can reduce alcohol consumption in high-risk drinkers and therefore be a suitable addition to interventions related to decreasing alcohol consumption in heavy drinkers. The study will be conducted online through the Prolific platform.

Participants will be recruited through Prolific. All participants will complete a series of demographic and psychometric questionnaires before beginning the study. Participants will also complete some of the psychometric questionnaires (RCQ, GAD-7, PHQ-9) at the end of the study to track any potential changes. Participants will be pre-screened for their motivation using a modified MTSS (Motivation to Stop Smoking) scale. Participants will also be asked to report their primary source of motivation regarding wanting to quit or reduce drinking, in addition to reporting their main goal regarding alcohol, where the options will be wanting to quit, wanting to reduce drinking, wanting to be more in control of their drinking, and not wanting to quit, reduce, or be more in control of drinking. All participants will also report their alcohol consumption using a timeline followback task with the ability to view both a calendar and a reference image of UK alcohol units. They'll report their alcohol consumption from the week before the study and complete two TLFBs during the study. Intervention group participants complete daily visual analogue scales of their mood. Control group participants complete daily reports of how many hours they spent online the previous day.