Perceptions of another person's heavy drinking as a function of one's relationship to the drinker a pilot study

Of 301 participants in a telephone survey, 201 could identify a problem drinker within their social networks. In 67 cases the drinker was a partner, in 45 another family member, in 61 a friend, and in 28 a work colleague. Another person's heavy drinking was reported as most disrupting to one's life when that person was a partner or other family member or if one was living in the same residence as the drinker. The exception to this was that reported disruption to respondents' work life was greatest when the drinker was a work colleague. While there appear to be problems for friends and work colleagues, partners and other family members appear to report the most disruption so providing services to family members seems appropriate.     

Test-retest reliability of the Holyoake Codependency Index with Australian students

The Holyoake Codependency Index is a 13-item self-report measure of three aspects of codependency: External Focus, Self-sacrifice, and a sense of being overwhelmed by another person's problematic behavior (termed Reactivity). Previous studies have supported internal validity and the internal consistency and construct validity of the subscales. The present scores for 59 students indicate full scale test-retest reliability of .88 and for subscales (.76 to .82) over a 3-wk. interval.     

Functional and dysfunctional impulsivity, depression, and suicidal ideation in a prison population

D. Lester (1993) was not able to show any association between dysfunctional impulsivity and suicidal ideation, but he did find a negative correlation between suicidal ideation and functional impulsivity. The correlation was weak and was not significant when depression was controlled for. Given the fact that college students were the participants in that study, the low correlations may have resulted from insufficient variance in the data. In the current study, data were collected from prisoners (half of whom had recently attempted suicide); correlations among the variables were stronger (but still quite low) than the correlations found in Lester's study. As expected, the association between dysfunctional impulsivity and suicidal ideation was stronger than that between functional impulsivity and suicidal ideation. However, consistent with Lester's study, these correlations were not significant when depression was controlled for. Results indicate that a direct association between impulsivity and suicidal ideation is unlikely.     

Development and validation of a revised measure of codependency

This study assessed the factor structure, internal consistency, and concurrent validity of a revised instrument, the Composite Codependency Scale (CCS), a 19‐item measure designed to assess codependent traits. Exploratory factor analysis of the CCS, using data from 301 adults from the general population and 49 attending members of Codependents Anonymous (CoDA), yielded three factors: self‐sacrifice, interpersonal control, and emotional suppression. The scale and its subscales exhibited good internal consistency. Consistent with the tenets of the codependency model, higher codependency scores were significantly associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety, stress, and familial dysfunction and lower levels of narcissistic tendencies, self‐esteem, and emotional expressivity. Furthermore, the revised measure effectively discriminated members of CoDA from those in the general population.     

Validation of the holyoake codependency index

Some clinicians working with families with alcohol or other drug problems continue to use the codependency model to guide their practice despite the limited empirical support for this approach. Research into codependency has been hampered by the lack of psychometrically sound instruments. The Holyoake Codependency Index (HCI; G. E. Dear & C. M. Roberts, 2000) is a 13-item self-report measure of codependent traits that has previously shown adequate to high reliability, initial evidence of construct validity, and an internal structure that is consistent across samples. In the 4 studies reported here, the internal structure of the HCI was confirmed using confirmatory factor analysis, and further evidence of construct validity was found in that the HCI subscales showed meaningful associations with other psychological and demographic variables.     

Synchronized cortical potentials and wavelet packets: a potential mechanism for perceptual binding and conveying information

Temporal synchronization in neuronal assemblies has been linked to the functional roles of perceptual binding, sensory-motor integration, attention, and information coding. We report new evidence for a common underlying mechanism that uses specific temporal patterns of synchronized neuronal activity as a basis for conveying information. The temporal patterns of stimulus-related synchronized neuronal discharges are structured to closely resemble specific members of the Symlet wavelet packet family employed in a computational framework. Together, these results suggest that temporal patterns of synchronized activity may act as a parallel, distributed code for information through a mechanism computationally equivalent to wavelet packet analysis.