# The role of positive urgency in alcohol-related risk-taking: a behavioral and neuroscientific investigation

> **NIH NIH F31** · INDIANA UNIVERSITY INDIANAPOLIS · 2020 · $34,970

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
 This project proposes to examine the role of positive urgency (i.e., a tendency to act rashly under extreme
positive emotions) for alcohol-related risk-taking in a well-controlled laboratory setting and using a large
neuroimaging dataset from the Nathan Kline Institute’s Rockland Project. Despite that there is a robust
relationship between positive urgency and risk-taking, how positive urgency increases positive emotion-based
alcohol-related risk-taking via behavioral and neuroscientific mechanisms is not well understood, which limits
attempts to reduce these adverse effects. The central hypotheses of this project are that 1) positive urgency is
associated with increased alcohol-related risk-taking because it interacts with positive emotions and alcohol
consumption to enhance positive emotions, which drive subsequent risk-taking and [2) positive urgency is
associated with the modular organization (e.g., how different brain nodes work together or separately across
time) of large-scale functional brain networks, which influences positive emotion-based risk-taking. The
proposed study will use a novel positive emotion induction with alcohol administration complemented with
sophisticated whole-brain data analyses to examine behavioral and neuroscientific evidence underlying
positive urgency. Further, the environment for research training is ideal due to close and ongoing collaboration
amongst Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, the Indiana Alcohol Research Center, and the IU
Health Neuroscience Center of Excellence. The training plan is carefully designed to provide training in
research methods, ethics, and professional development issues that will aid the transition to an independent
research career.] The main study hypotheses are: 1) Positive urgency will be more strongly associated with
risk-taking in the positive (vs. neutral) emotion induction condition. 2) Positive urgency will be more strongly
associated with risk-taking in the alcohol (vs. non-alcoholic beverage) consumption condition. 3) The
relationship between positive urgency and risk-taking will be mediated by increased positive emotion changes
in positive emotion induction condition, and the relationship between positive urgency and positive emotion
change will be moderated by alcohol (i.e., more change in the alcohol vs. non-alcohol condition). [4) Positive
urgency will be associated with modular flexibility of salience network-related nodes. 5) Positive urgency will be
associated with greater cohesion strength in salience network-related nodes. 6) Positive urgency will mediate
the relationship between whole brain modularity patterns and alcohol-related problems.] Successful completion
of this work has a strong potential to aid the development of positive urgency-based prevention and
intervention for alcohol use that incorporates behavioral and neuroscientific evidence of positive urgency and
inform lay public, health care providers, and resear...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9844409
- **Project number:** 5F31AA026767-02
- **Recipient organization:** INDIANA UNIVERSITY INDIANAPOLIS
- **Principal Investigator:** Miji Um
- **Activity code:** F31 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $34,970
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-12-01 → 2020-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9844409

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9844409, The role of positive urgency in alcohol-related risk-taking: a behavioral and neuroscientific investigation (5F31AA026767-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9844409. Licensed CC0.

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