Date of Award

5-21-1998

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Thomas Petros

Abstract

Alcohol abuse has been the focus of a great deal of research over the past several decades. More recently, a substantial number of studies have begun to look at a population thought to be at risk for alcohol abuse, the children of alcoholics. Individuals at risk for the development of alcoholism often display the same cognitive deficits as alcoholics and it has been suggested that these deficits may be a factor in the development of alcoholism. The present study examined cognitive functioning in male and female adult children of male alcoholics (FH+) and controls (FH$-$) on measures of spatial processing to explore the specific components of spatial processing that may be impaired in adult children of alcoholics. Additional measures of information processing were included to examine specific components of information processing impaired in ACAs. The potential moderating influence of gender and verbal ability on performance was also examined. Ninety FH+ subjects and 106 FH$-$ subjects were matched on age and WAIS-R vocabulary scores. Results of a paired associate learning task revealed that for high verbal ability subjects, FH+ females performed significantly poorer than FH$-$ females, while FH+ and FH$-$ males did not significantly differ. However, for low verbal ability subjects, FH$-$ females performed significantly poorer than FH+ females, while FH+ and FH$-$ males did not significantly differ. Results of a mental rotation task revealed poorer performance for FH+ than FH$-$ subjects who were high verbal, while the reverse was observed for low verbal subjects. FH+ females performed significantly worse than FH$-$ females on the digit symbol but no effects of family history were observed for males. Results of the digit span backwards indicated male FH+ subjects performed significantly worse than male FH$-$ subjects, but the reverse was observed for females. Family history effects that varied according to gender were also observed for the Sternberg task. The result suggest the necessity of considering gender and the verbal ability when conducting studies of individuals at risk for alcoholism.

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