Attitude towards morality in alcohol dependence syndrome with and without family history of alcoholism

Pages: 872-876
Deepak Salvi (Department of Clinical Psychology, Amity Institute of Behavior and Allied Sciences (AIBAS), Amity University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, Rajasthan)

Morality is generally defined in terms of codes of values and system of behavior with regard to standards of right or wrong behavior. Moral attitudes and judgments depend on the integration of complex cognitive and emotional processes. Addiction is associated with core deficits in both cognitive and emotional processing, which may jointly lead to impairment or biases in moral processing, reasoning, decision-making and related attitude. Alcohol Dependence Syndrome (ADS) is a chronic relapsing disorder which has significant implication in the development of poor moral attitude. Furthermore, family history of alcoholism especially parental alcoholism also plays a pivotal role on morality. This study is aimed at exploring the effect of Alcohol Dependence Syndrome with and without family history of alcoholism on attitude towards morality. For family history of alcoholism, we considered and included parental alcoholism. The sample of the study consisted of 120 subjects aged 20-40 years and was divided into two groups, i.e., clinical and normal ones. Clinical group consisted of 60 patients diagnosed as Alcohol Dependence Syndrome. Purposive sampling was used to collect the sample. Two-Way Analysis Of Variance and a 2×2 factorial design were employed to study the main and interaction effects of alcoholism and family history on the variable of attitude towards morality. The results confirmed that the main effect of alcoholism and family history were found to be significant on attitude towards morality among subjects. However, the interactive effect of alcoholism and family history were found to be insignificant. The present study has the implications of the potential role of psychosocial interventions to promote healthy moral attitude in the relapse prevention strategies of substance use related problems.