The roles of self-esteem and alcohol in relationship conflict and aggression, do insecurity and intoxication lead to lashing out?

Abstract

The goal of this dissertation is to focus on how relationship conflicts are influenced by two factors that the literature suggests contribute to an increased likelihood of aggression in relationships: low self-esteem and alcohol. This thesis improves on past work examining the influence of self-esteem and alcohol on relationship conflict and aggression by considering what interactive effects the two variables might have, and by using chiefly experimental methods which are designed to help assess whether or not self-esteem and alcohol play causal roles.

According to dependency regulation theory (Murray, Holmes, MacDonald, & Ellsworth, 1998) low self-esteem individuals should be more likely to fear rejection from close others. Alcohol myopia theory (Steele & Josephs, 1990) predicts that intoxicated individuals, as a result of reduced cognitive capacity, will be prone to becoming more focused on the most salient cues in their environment. By considering these two theories in tandem, I hypothesize that intoxicated, low self-esteem people will become highly focused on their insecurities when engaging in relationship conflict, resulting in a more aggressive response to conflict.

I conducted four studies to test this hypothesis. Study 1 is an experiment which shows that threats to the sense that they are valued by their partners cause low self-esteem people to react defensively to relationship conflict. In Study 2, an experiment designed to test the causal role of alcohol in influencing relationship conflict, intoxicated, low self-esteem people randomly assigned to an alcohol condition became more insecure in their partners' affections, and more blaming for a conflict incident. Study 3, a survey, showed that low self-esteem people report using more aggression in conflict when they have been drinking, while high self-esteem people report using less aggression in intoxicated conflicts. Finally, although Study 4, a replication and extension of Study 2, was not successful in replicating the previous studies in some respects, it did provide some evidence that the combination of alcohol and threats to the sense that one is valued by one's partner can be causal factors in relationship aggression.

The discussion highlights the contribution of this dissertation to implicating alcohol and low self-esteem as causal factors in heightened relationship conflict and aggression, while emphasizing the fact that more work needs to be done to determine the exact causal impact of each factor individually. I suggest that future research on this topic would benefit greatly from a closer look at the role of feelings of hurt in the alcohol-aggression link.