Introduction
The article studies personality issues among male people with alcoholism. Social damage from addiction is enormous, where families break up, crime grows, and life expectancy and the intellectual level of society decreases. Alcoholism has a significant negative impact on the quality of the gene pool of the entire social system. Children of alcoholics have reduced mental potential, suffer from various diseases of the central nervous system, which ultimately inhibits the normal development of society as a whole. The article’s primary question is how personality features and alcoholism are linked. The main hypothesis is that personality disorders are caused by alcohol dependency, which disorganizes social and psychological adaptation patterns. This leads to the fact that maladaptive personal properties are fixed, precisely because of the specific social and socio-psychological conditions that provoke alcohol consumption.
Main text
Nevertheless, alcohol consumption continues to grow steadily, and the experts are inclined to consider the main reason for this non-encouraging tendency to be personality changes. The sample size of the study is 194 males, who consumed 40g of pure alcohol per day (Berglund et al., 2011). The main descriptive statistical tools are normative T-scores, where individual raw data was changed into means analysis. The applied concepts are the Soft Independent Modelling of Class Analogy (SIMCA) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) (Berglund et al., 2011). The main message of the authors is that the personality degradation occurring during alcoholism is directly caused by problems of a socio-psychological nature.
The statistical approach could have included the variables of marital status and employment history, which would outline alcoholism triggering events. The statistical evaluation shows that the methodology fully covers the population sample, but it dismisses the individual level intricacies (Berglund et al., 2011). This would increase the overall understanding of the causes and allow to design of preventative measures. To a certain extent, personality changes relate to the stage of alcoholism. An alcohol-guided person counts on treating himself/herself as a patient in need of care and support, and this is seen as a conditional psychological benefit. An alcoholic is generally subject to excessive personality dissociation, which leads to an internal dialogue between alcoholic and sober subpersonalities.
There are minor limitations and assumptions in the article’s statistical analysis. It makes sense to associate personality disorders in alcoholism with the level of claims from the point of view of the situational approach. Thus, the main limitation is a high dependency on the circumstance to identify alcoholic features. It is not possible to turn in detail to the consideration of the main provisions of this article. A similar structure of the level of claims is observed not only in many cases of pronounced development of psychopathic personality disorders states but also with fixed alcohol dependence (Berglund et al., 2011). It is known that the process of solving a difficult task usually consists of three stages.
First, the step of immediate decisions when a person tries to immediately find the right way out. Second, there are a series of setbacks, where he/she attempts to postpone the treatment. Third, the personality changes, which makes a person unreasonable and highly addicted. Therefore, the main assumption is that the article analyzes the problem only as a three-stage issue (Berglund et al., 2011). The study could have included more steps or viewed alcoholism as a five-stage process, where it involves trigger events and the point of problem recognition.
The authors used mainly the Karolinska Scales of Personality (KSP) as the main personality frame for statistical pattern recognition. They applied the SIMCA for the given purpose, which was followed by PCA to compress the images. By categorizing data into normative T-score, they were able to understand that the personality changes of the first stage of alcohol dependence are mostly clear and easy to structure in the mainstream of theories of social psychology (Tanner, 2016). It is much more difficult to investigate personality changes in the second stage since they are much more challenging to see the setbacks. By non-binary analysis, the authors identified that during the second stage of alcoholism, persistent neurosis and psychopathic-like disorders arise along with personality shifts, which are often closely associated with characteristics before illness (Berglund et al., 2011). T-score pattern recognition resulted in realizing that the third stage is linked with the alcoholism-specific and personality shifts and psychopathic-like changes in the second stage of alcoholism (Tanner, 2016). Some signs suggest a decrease in the level of personal organization and the ability to integrate mental processes in the social channel.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the article focuses on this topic of alcoholism and relies on material from both theoretical and empirical studies, where the main idea is that personality disorders are caused by alcohol dependence. This leads to the fact that maladaptive personal properties are fixed, precisely because of the specific purely social and socio-psychological conditions that provoke alcohol consumption. However, these properties were mainly formed before the onset of alcohol abuse, which means that they were formally actualized in a situation that led to the formation of a stable dependence as a maladaptive behavioral contour. As a result, a complete version of circular dependence was already formed. Alcohol and lowering the level of anxiety, at the same time, reduce the effectiveness of adaptation processes, the functions of which are replaced by regular consumption. The response to the very psycho-emotional situation of alcohol intake is determined mainly by socio-cultural factors that reduce the availability of social support.
References
Berglund, K., Roman, E., Balldin, J., Berggren, U., Eriksson, M., Gustavsson, P., & Fahlke, C. (2011). Do men with excessive alcohol consumption and social stability have an addictive personality? Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 52(3), 257-260.
Tanner, D. (2016). Statistics for the behavioral & social sciences. San-Diego, US: Bridgepoint Education.