Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Clinical Psychology

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

College students experience high rates of cannabis use and use-related problems. Existing brief online interventions for cannabis misuse among college students do not significantly reduce cannabis use and use-related problems relative to control conditions. This may be due to limited consideration of the role of affect, given that cannabis is frequently used for managing affect, especially among individuals with greater depression and social anxiety. The present study sought to improve the efficacy of brief online interventions for cannabis misuse among college students by testing the efficacy of the Three Good Things (3GT; Seligman et al., 2005) intervention, a daily exercise that targets positive affect (PA), compared to a negative affect reduction condition (NAC) adapted from prior work (Buckner et al., 2020) and an inactive control condition. Undergraduates with past-month cannabis use and at least two past-month cannabis-related problems (N = 286) completed a baseline survey, were randomized to one of the three conditions, and completed a follow-up survey two weeks later. Counter to hypotheses, although cannabis use outcomes and depression (but not PA) decreased over time, there were no statistically significantly differences by condition. Also counter to hypotheses, baseline depression and cannabis-related problem severity did not moderate the effects of condition on cannabis outcomes. As hypothesized, social anxiety significantly moderated the effect of condition on follow-up cannabis use frequency, yet counter to hypothesis participants in 3GT with lower social anxiety reported more frequent cannabis use than participants in the NAC (but not control) condition. These findings suggest brief online intervention targeting PA may not improve short-term cannabis outcomes overall. Clinical implications are discussed.

Date

7-28-2025

Committee Chair

Buckner, Julia

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_dissertations.6879

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Available for download on Thursday, July 30, 2026

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