Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Psychology

Committee Director

Sage Hawn

Committee Member

Sara Ehlke

Committee Member

James Paulson

Abstract

Individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are more than four times as likely to develop cannabis use disorder (CUD) as those without PTSD. This common co-occurrence is often interpreted through a self-medication framework in which cannabis is used to manage PTSD symptoms. Prior work has relied heavily on veteran samples, includes measures of cannabis coping that are not specific to PTSD, and has most commonly examined total PTSD symptom severity, limiting precision in understanding how discrete symptom clusters relate to cannabis outcomes. The present study sought to examine associations between individual PTSD symptom clusters and cannabis use severity and to evaluate the moderating and mediating effects of trauma-related cannabis use to cope (TRCU) on these associations. Participants were 345 trauma-exposed undergraduates who reported cannabis use in the past six months and completed an online self-report battery via Qualtrics. The sample was predominantly female (82%), racially diverse (45.5% White, 39.4% Black/African American), with a mean age of 22.19 years (SD = 6.45). All PTSD symptom clusters were positively associated with cannabis use severity at the bivariate level, but none uniquely predicted cannabis use when modeled together. TRCU moderated the association between intrusion symptoms and cannabis use and fully mediated associations between all clusters and cannabis use severity. Dominance analyses identified arousal symptoms, particularly reckless/self-destructive behavior, as the most influential predictors of cannabis use. Taken together, these findings suggest that TRCU may serve as a clinically useful screening indicator of heightened cannabis-related risk among trauma-exposed college students, and that interventions may benefit from targeting trauma-related coping intentions and expectancies for cannabis use specifically in the arousal domain.

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In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

https://doi.org/10.25777/m7rr-kp72

ISBN

9798197810656

ORCID

0009-0001-9314-7604

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