Towards an affect intensity regulation hypothesis: Systematic review and meta-analyses of the relationship between affective states and alcohol consumption

Anna Tovmasyan; Rebecca L. Monk; Derek Heim

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0262670

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionSeptember 22, 2021
18 Nov 2021 Decision Letter - Jose M. Moran, Editor PONE-D-21-30664Towards an affect intensity reinforcement hypothesis: A systematic review and meta-analyses of the relationship between affective states and alcohol consumptionPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Tovmasyan, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. After review of the manuscript, both the reviewers and myself agree that there are major issues in the current version of the manuscript that need to be addressed/responded to by the authors. The major concerns are associated with the search strategy used by the authors that may have missed key literature for the meta-analysis. Also of concern is the fact that the authors indicate that they have followed the PRISMA guidelines and, for example, do not present a full electronic search strategy for at least one database, including any limits used, such that it could be repeated. The search strategy and in which database, including limits used, should be indicated. Authors should strictly verify their adherence to the PRISMA guidelines in this manuscript. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 02 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Jose M. Moran Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. We note that you have referenced (Lenhard W, Lenhard A. Computation of Effect Sizes [Internet]. Unpublished;)which has currently not yet been accepted for publication. Please remove this from your References and amend this to state in the body of your manuscript: (ie “Lenhard W, Lenhard. [Unpublished]”) as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-reference-style 3. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The study attempted to clarify the pooled association between affective states and alcohol consumption by conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis. Overall, this study did a thorough and comprehensive discussion of previous literature and relevant theories. If the following issues can be addressed or clarified deeply, this study would be of good quality: 1. The authors stated that the operational definitions of mood and emotions in the Operational Definitions section, it is suggested that the operational definitions of alcohol consumption also be provided (page 8, line 189). 2. Although the three terms ‘mood’, ‘emotion’, and ‘feeling’ and ‘affect’ are often used interchangeably in the literature, there are many and significant debates regarding their similarities and differences in some aspects. The authors are encouraged to have a part discussing them in order to support the approach used: “... the terms ‘affect’, and ‘affective state’ are used in this review as umbrella terms for the experience of mood, emotion, or feeling”. 3. In the section of Literature Review, the authors used one of the commands for searching: ‘alcohol consumption’ rather than ‘alcohol’. This could lead to a loss of a certain amount of candidate studies for meta-analysis (page 9, line 225). 4. Also, in the section of Literature Review, the search term ‘feeling’ should be added as the authors mentioned ‘...as umbrella terms for the experience of mood, emotion, or feeling’ (page 9, line 226). 5. The meta-regression approach is used to work on “numeric moderator variables” such as year of publication. However, the study also applied this method, instead of the subgroup analysis approach, to examine the effects of categorical moderators (i.e., country and study design). Can the author clarify this? 6. Although no study with poor quality is included in this meta-analysis, running a moderator analysis of study quality has its great value. 7. In the ‘Meta-analysis – Analytical Strategy’ section, the authors mentioned ‘Several categorical moderators were examined ... alcohol consumption measure ...’. However, why the moderator analyses of such a variable (i.e., alcohol consumption measure) seem to be missing in Results. 8. In this meta-analysis, most of the included studies are from the USA; this may limit the extrapolation of the study’s result to some extent, even the related moderator analyses did not find an effect. It would be better that the study may have some discussion regarding this issue. Reviewer #2: In this manuscript, Tovmasyan et al. performed meta-analyses for the relationship between affect and alcohol consumption. They found that the affect intensity, for both positive and negative affect, is associated with alcohol consumption. The study was well-conducted, the manuscript detailed the analysis approaches and methods, and the findings appear to be sound. The implications of the findings are likely to impact the field substantively. Overall, there are no major issues with the manuscript. Minor issues are listed below: 1. Two separate figures were labeled as Figure 1: both the flowchart of the study selection process (line 329 – 372) and P-curve plot for studies on negative affect and alcohol consumption (line 435 – 438). 2. There were 149 references listed at the end of the manuscript. However, the text referred up to 157. The missing references need to be listed. 3. In the text, most of the time figures were referred to with a capital ‘F’. There were places where lower case ‘f’ was used (for example, line 431, 434, 469, 472). Please make it consistent. 4. Line 551: The reference number (142) should be after the word “literature”. 5. Line 614: Please add a comma after the word “consumption”. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262670.r001
Revision 1
14 Dec 2021 Author Response Dear Dr Moran, Thank you for giving us the chance to revise this manuscript, and to both you and the reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments. Below we outline how we have responded to each reviewer comment. We have also uploaded a version of the manuscript with tracked changes, should this be desired by the reviewers. Having made these changes, we hope you will now find it acceptable for publication. Best wishes, Anna Tovmasyan *The major concerns are associated with the search strategy used by the authors that may have missed key literature for the meta-analysis. Also of concern is the fact that the authors indicate that they have followed the PRISMA guidelines and, for example, do not present a full electronic search strategy for at least one database, including any limits used, such that it could be repeated. The search strategy and in which database, including limits used, should be indicated. Authors should strictly verify their adherence to the PRISMA guidelines in this manuscript. Thanks for this comment. The following has been added to the methods section in order to more fully outline our search strategy, as you suggest: “The search was conducted on 2nd March 2020. For PsychINFO, after the filters ‘empirical study’ and ‘quantitative study’ were applied, the search yielded 8285 articles for screening. For PsychARTICLES, when the same filters were applied, the search yielded three articles. For Science Direct, as wildcards “” were not supported, the search terms were ("alcohol " OR "drinking behavior” OR “drinking behaviour”) AND ("mood" OR "emotions" OR “feelings” OR "affective states") NOT "disorders". After the filter ‘research articles’ was applied, the search yielded 2327 articles. For PubMed (3189 citations), SCOPUS (1201 citations), and JSTOR (367 citations), no filters were applied. The citations were loaded to RefWorks software, and the duplicates were removed. … To ensure that all relevant literature published at the time was covered, a supplementary search was conducted on 29th January 2021, which yielded 3 additional references”. The search has also been re-run following these suggestions proposed by reviewers (specified in more detail below). This resulted in inclusion of one additional citation. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE’s style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf This has now been amended. 2. We note that you have referenced (Lenhard W, Lenhard A. Computation of Effect Sizes [Internet]. Unpublished;)which has currently not yet been accepted for publication. Please remove this from your References and amend this to state in the body of your manuscript: (ie “Lenhard W, Lenhard. [Unpublished]”) as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-reference-style This has now been amended. 3. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. This has now been amended. Reviewers' comments: Reviewer #1: The study attempted to clarify the pooled association between affective states and alcohol consumption by conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis. Overall, this study did a thorough and comprehensive discussion of previous literature and relevant theories. If the following issues can be addressed or clarified deeply, this study would be of good quality: 1. The authors stated that the operational definitions of mood and emotions in the Operational Definitions section, it is suggested that the operational definitions of alcohol consumption also be provided (page 8, line 189). Thank you for this helpful suggestion. The following has now been added to ‘Operational Definitions’ section: “Alcohol consumption is defined as ingesting any beverage containing ethanol.” 2. Although the three terms ‘mood’, ‘emotion’, and ‘feeling’ and ‘affect’ are often used interchangeably in the literature, there are many and significant debates regarding their similarities and differences in some aspects. The authors are encouraged to have a part discussing them in order to support the approach used: “... the terms ‘affect’, and ‘affective state’ are used in this review as umbrella terms for the experience of mood, emotion, or feeling”. Thank you for this valuable point. The following has now been added to ‘Operational Definitions’ section: “While it is possible that mood and emotions have different effects on alcohol consumption volume over longer periods of time, the current focus was on the effects of within a shorter timeframe, where the distinction between mood and emotions is arguably less important”. As the terms are often being used interchangeably, we decided to include all of them to make sure all the relevant literature is included. In the discussion, we also now address this point and suggest that further research on the issue is required: “Furthermore, the current meta-analyses focused on affective states in general without looking at potential differences between mood and emotional state. While this decision was made because there is an overlap between these constructs and, for this reason, many studies use these terms interchangeably, further meta-analytical studies may wish to look at conceivably different effects of mood versus emotional state on alcohol consumption”. 3. In the section of Literature Review, the authors used one of the commands for searching: ‘alcohol consumption’ rather than ‘alcohol’. This could lead to a loss of a certain amount of candidate studies for meta-analysis (page 9, line 225). 4. Also, in the section of Literature Review, the search term ‘feeling’ should be added as the authors mentioned ‘...as umbrella terms for the experience of mood, emotion, or feeling’ (page 9, line 226). Thank you for highlighting these important considerations. Given that the focus of the current paper was on the acute impact of affect on alcohol consumption, the search term ‘alcohol consumption’ was used rather than just ‘alcohol’. Given your suggestion, however, we did also carry out a new search using the broader search terms. Similarly, we felt that adding the term ‘feeling’ was unlikely result in additional relevant literature, as our review focused on quantitative research, where the scales tend to measure either mood (e.g., POMS), emotions (e.g., STAI), or affect in general (e.g., PANAS). On the other hand, feelings are more commonly measured by qualitative research studies, which were not included in the current study. That being said, it is important to question one’s (potentially biasing) assumptions and thank you for highlighting this. Accordingly, we carried out an additional search using this broader search term. When the search with updates terms has been carried out, this resulted in inclusion of one additional citation to our meta-analyses. 5. The meta-regression approach is used to work on “numeric moderator variables” such as year of publication. However, the study also applied this method, instead of the subgroup analysis approach, to examine the effects of categorical moderators (i.e., country and study design). Can the author clarify this? Of course. We followed the approach outlined in the book ‘Doing meta-analysis with R’ (Harrer et al., 2021, p. 198), according to which “subgroup analysis is nothing else than a meta-regression with a categorical predictor”. We have added the following clarification to our analytical strategy section “The effects of categorical moderators (i.e., country and study design) were assessed using meta-regression approach, as suggested by Harrer et al. (77).” 6. Although no study with poor quality is included in this meta-analysis, running a moderator analysis of study quality has its great value. We agree that this was an oversight. An analysis with study quality as a moderator has now been conducted and while study quality was not a significant moderator, this has now been added to the text. 7. In the ‘Meta-analysis – Analytical Strategy’ section, the authors mentioned ‘Several categorical moderators were examined ... alcohol consumption measure ...’. However, why the moderator analyses of such a variable (i.e., alcohol consumption measure) seem to be missing in Results. Thank you for highlighting this omission – the results of this moderator analysis have now been added to the manuscript. 8. In this meta-analysis, most of the included studies are from the USA; this may limit the extrapolation of the study’s result to some extent, even the related moderator analyses did not find an effect. It would be better that the study may have some discussion regarding this issue. This is a valuable point, which we now include in the discussion where we highlight the need for additional research in other national contexts, which may differ with regards to the sociocultural positioning of alcohol (p. 59). Reviewer #2: In this manuscript, Tovmasyan et al. performed meta-analyses for the relationship between affect and alcohol consumption. They found that the affect intensity, for both positive and negative affect, is associated with alcohol consumption. The study was well-conducted, the manuscript detailed the analysis approaches and methods, and the findings appear to be sound. The implications of the findings are likely to impact the field substantively. Overall, there are no major issues with the manuscript. Minor issues are listed below: *1. Two separate figures were labeled as Figure 1: both the flowchart of the study selection process (line 329 – 372) and P-curve plot for studies on negative affect and alcohol consumption (line 435 – 438). Thank you for highlighting this – this has now been amended. 2. There were 149 references listed at the end of the manuscript. However, the text referred up to 157. The missing references need to be listed. Thank you, we appreciate your highlighting of this error – it seems to be stemming from incorrect numbering in the text rather than missing references. We have now thoroughly checked the manuscript to ensure all the references are in the correct place. 3. In the text, most of the time figures were referred to with a capital ‘F’. There were places where lower case ‘f’ was used (for example, line 431, 434, 469, 472). Please make it consistent. Thank you – this has now been amended 4. Line 551: The reference number (142) should be after the word “literature”. Thank you – this has now been amended **5. Line 614: Please add a comma after the word “consumption”. Thank you – this has now been amended. Once again, we thank the reviewers and editors for their valuable feedback. This has enabled us to strengthen considerably the submission. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262670.r002
4 Jan 2022 Decision Letter - Jose M. Moran, Editor Towards an affect intensity regulation hypothesis: A systematic review and meta-analyses of the relationship between affective states and alcohol consumption PONE-D-21-30664R1 Dear Dr. Tovmasyan, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Jose M. Moran Section Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: Well written and studied. The authors have carefully and detailedly commented the remarks of the reviewers on an earlier version of the manuscript and have taken most of the remarks of the reviewers into consideration for the current version. Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262670.r003
Formally Accepted
20 Jan 2022 Acceptance Letter - Jose M. Moran, Editor PONE-D-21-30664R1 Towards an affect intensity regulation hypothesis: Systematic review and meta-analyses of the relationship between affective states and alcohol consumption Dear Dr. Tovmasyan: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Jose M. Moran Section Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262670.r004

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .