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Introduction
This article discusses the classification of alcoholism and investigation of personality traits. As the subjects were selected 100 men with excessive alcohol consumption. They were interviewed by telephone or visual conversation. Thereafter, they were designed to a research center for examination. And as a result, the hypothesis that male individuals with excessive alcohol consumption do not have a specific ‘‘addictive’’ personality, was confirmed in this study.
Body
Authors tried to answer the question about do male individuals with excessive alcohol consumption have a specific “addictive” personality or not? The main objective of the present study was to investigate personality traits in a group of male individuals with excessive alcohol consumption and in controls by comparison with normative data and also by a multivariate projection-based approach. For the latter purpose, principal component analysis (PCA) was used for pattern recognition and image compression, thus identifying the most important gradients, that is, revealing the hidden structure of traits (Eriksson, Johansson, Kettaneh-Wold, Trygg, Wikstro¨m & Wold,2006)
The researchers tested the hypothesis that male individuals with excessive alcohol consumption do not have a specific ‘‘addictive’’ personality. To do this, all individual data from personality examinations KSP was transformed into normative T-scores. The method used for pattern recognition and image compression in this study was called The Soft Independent Modeling of Class Analogy (SIMCA) Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This method can deal with non-linear relationships based from the various measures for each individual form a multidimensional space. The result of statistical testing were considered statistically significant with p-value lesser than 0.05.
According to testing procedure, the individuals were compared with a control group. The individuals with excessive alcohol consumption as well as the controls had mean values within the normative range. But the variance of individuals with excessive alcohol consumptions and the control group was significantly different. The objective group has significantly more outliers in comparison to controls. The base of this testing was Pearson’s chi-square test.
Now about limitations of this study. First of all, only middle-aged men were included in this study. The second is that they were recruited by advertisements, mainly aimed to investigate pharmacotherapeutical interventions for excessive alcohol (Balldin et al., 1994; Eriksson et al., 2001a, 2001b). These limitations may impede the generalization of the findings to other groups of individuals with excessive alcohol consumption. Moreover, the control group was recruited from a population-based Swedish Twin Registry (Pedersen et al., 1991). It cannot be excluded that some individuals within that group also had excessive alcohol consumption. Finally, it may be argued that the samples were relatively small for such statistical analysis as PCA. It should, however, be noted that the total sample was 231 individuals.
Conclusion
Thus, the hypothesis that male individuals with excessive alcohol consumption do not have a specific “addictive” personality, was confirmed. This group as well as the population-based control group had mean values within the normative range in all scales of the KSP. Furthermore the score plot in the PCA did not indicate a between-group separation.
The majority of male individuals with excessive alcohol consumption, recruited by advertisement and at the time of the study not participating in any treatment, do not have a personality different from that of a general population. This finding thus supports the notion that there exists no “addictive” personality. As socially stable men with excessive alcohol consumption may represent the majority of the population with alcohol problems, this finding may be of importance when formulating national guidelines for care-giving and treatment of this group.
Sources
Eriksson, M., Berggren, U., Blennow, K., Fahlke, C. & Balldin, J.(2001a). Further investigation of citalopram on alcohol consumption in heavy drinkers: Responsiveness possibly linked to the DRD2 A2/A2 genotype. Alcohol, 24, 15–23.
Eriksson, M., Fahlke, C., Hansen, S., Berggren, U., Ma˚rin, P. & Balldin, J. (2001b). No effect of the cortisol-synthesis inhibitor metyrapone on alcohol drinking: A pilot study. Alcohol, 25, 115–122.
Eriksson, L., Johansson, E., Kettaneh-Wold, N., Trygg, J., Wikstro¨m, C. & Wold, S. (2006). Multi- and megavariate data analysis. Part I: Basic principles and applications. Second revised and enlarged edition (p . 425). Umea˚: Umetrics AB.
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