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Abstract
Background: Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOAs) have shown poorer psychosocial outcomes compared to their counterparts (non-ACOAs). These poorer outcomes, however, are not consistently present between groups. Investigating psychological markers of such functioning can help to highlight nuances between ACOAs and non-ACOAs even when mean differences of psychosocial outcomes are not present. This is pertinent to the study of ACOAs to understand predictors of positive well-being trajectories. Objective: The aim of the present study was to compare the linguistic content of ACOAs and non-ACOAs in relation to psychological functioning. Method: A quasi-experimental design was employed; ACOAs (n = 53) and non-ACOAs (n = 80) were asked to write a significant memory in which they went through a change of some kind (i.e., turning point) regarding a parent. Participants were then asked to complete measures of psychological functioning. Using a word counting software, we identified verbal immediacy, a combination of words signifying psychological closeness, within participants’ memories. Results: Results indicated no mean differences in the amount of verbal immediacy amid ACOAs and non-ACOAs, but there were differences in its predictive ability between groups. Among ACOAs, verbal immediacy predicted better psychological functioning. Yet, there was no association found among non-ACOAs. Conclusions/Importance: These results show that psychological closeness, among ACOAs, is indicative of better psychological functioning, even though it is typically associated with worse outcomes. This suggests that vulnerable individuals may have nontraditional correlates between psychological markers, like verbal immediacy, and such functioning and should be assessed when comparing these populations.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dr. William L. Dunlop for granting us autonomous use of the present data.
Declaration of interest
There are no conflicting interests with the present study.
Notes
1 We recognize the term alcoholic may negatively stigmatize individuals who engage in alcohol misuse or harmful alcohol use. Therefore, we refrain from directly using this term throughout the present article. However, there is a need for researchers who study alcohol/drug use or related topics to find consensus on proper terminology (see Kelly, Saitz, & Wakeman, Citation2016). Because organizations, such as Al-Anon or Alcoholics Anonymous, continue to use alcoholics we sought to use ACOA, and non-ACOA throughout the present article. By doing so, these terms may be more easily accessible to individuals within such organizations who wish to examine research on this topic.
2 The participants used in McCoy and Dunlop’s (Citation2017) study are the same participants being used for the present study. However, the data are being examined in ways unique for the present article, such that analyses conducted in McCoy and Dunlop’s (Citation2017) paper are not being done for the present article. One such difference included assessing mean differences in well-being among ACOAs and non-ACOAs (see McCoy & Dunlop, Citation2017). Therefore, we did not focus on mean-level differences regarding psychological functioning for ACOAs and non-ACOAs in the present article.
3 This prompt was edited slightly to request memories regarding parents, as this interview requests participants to share memories from their lives generally, without reference to a particular context, such as a parent-child relationship.
4 Turning points, as expected, have normally distributed proportions of both positive and negative emotion words used among ACOAs and non-ACOAs. Skewness for positive emotion words is 1.28 and 1.09, respectively. Skewness for negative emotion words is 0.59 and 0.72, respectively. Overall the positivity of these turning point narratives, as rated by human coders, also indicated that, on average, they were considered “neutral” between “very negative” and “very positive.”
5 Results were consistent absent of controlling variables, except for negative affect among non-ACOAs. The predictive ability (and variance accounted for) became non-significant (ps = 0.135).