ArticleJournal of personality2025
Distress tolerance is linked with substance use motivations and problems in young adults across four continents.
Article in Journal of personality, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Psychological distress, distress tolerance, and cannabis-related problems among university students in Türkiye: a mixed-methods study.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Relapse risk, frustration tolerance, and motivational readiness for change in substance use disorders.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Designing digital health interventions for opioid use disorder: Perspectives on iENDURE.Digital healthArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
introductionPeople low in trait distress tolerance are at higher risk for harmful patterns of substance use. Some evidence suggests that maladaptive motives for substance use account for this correlation. However, the generality of these associations remains in doubt because virtually all available data come from North American samples.
methodUsing data from 7 countries (total N = 5858; U.S., Argentina, Uruguay, Spain, South Africa, Canada, and England), we examined distress tolerance's association with alcohol- and cannabis-related problems in young adults. On an exploratory basis, we examined how distress tolerance related to different substance-use motivations.
resultsWe found that distress tolerance was inversely related to problematic alcohol and cannabis use (rs = -0.14 and - 0.13). There was notable variation across countries in the magnitude of these effects, particularly for cannabis-related problems. Additionally, exploratory analyses revealed statistically significant (cross-sectional) indirect effects of distress tolerance on substance-related problems via substance-use motivations related to neutralizing negative emotions.
conclusionsDistress tolerance's role in substance-use problems appears to generalize beyond North America, although effect sizes were generally small and varied notably across geographical regions. Distress tolerance's connection with negative reinforcement processes (e.g., coping motives) warrants attention as a possible mediator of its association with problematic substance use.
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