Negative urgency and affective dynamics: Associations with alcohol use and condomless intercourse among sexual minority men.

OBJECTIVE

Urgency, the tendency to act impulsively in response to emotions, is associated with a wide range of risk behavior. This study tested whether urgency is associated with individual differences in emotional dynamics and whether emotional dynamics account for associations between urgency and alcohol use and condomless anal intercourse (CAI) among sexual minority men.

METHOD: We conducted a secondary analysis of data from 248 moderate-to-heavy drinking sexual minority men who completed two 3-week periods (bursts) of the experience sampling method separated by a 3-week rest interval. Two dynamic structural equation models tested urgency's associations with intoxication and CAI.

RESULTS

The negative affect (NA) model showed that negative urgency at baseline was associated with higher NA innovation variance (e.g., reactivity or lability) and higher mean NA, but not inertia (i.e., autoregression) during Burst 1. Mean NA and reactivity were correlated with mean intoxication during Burst 2. Negative urgency was indirectly associated with intoxication and CAI during Burst 2 via mean NA during Burst 1. The positive affect (PA) model found that positive urgency was linked to PA innovation variance but not mean PA or PA inertia. PA reactivity during Burst 1 predicted mean intoxication during Burst 2. However, indirect effects of positive urgency on Burst 2 mean intoxication and CAI were nonsignificant.

CONCLUSIONS

Associations between urgency and PA and NA innovation variance (e.g., reactivity or lability) are consistent with the conceptualization of urgency as reflecting rash action when aroused and suggest that urgency is associated with more volatile emotional experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).