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greater desire to drink if they were told they were given alcohol than if they were told they were given a soft drink. Moderately dependent participants drank more quickly if they were told they had been given alcohol regardless of the content of the drink. As the authors note in the discussion of their findings “the demonstrable importance of psychobiological aspects of alcohol dependence in no way undermines a learning model account of the syndrome” (Stockwell et al. 1982 p. 521), but does give support to the view that severity of dependence predicts responsiveness to alcohol related cues.
The studies noted above have important explanatory power in the predictive validity of degree of dependence with reference to abstinence or controlled drinking outcomes. Sanchez-Craig et al. (1984) and Foy et al. (1984) found that severity of dependence predicted abstinent or moderation drinking outcomes regardless of the goal of the treatment to which their subjects were assigned. Polich et al. (1981) found that severity of dependence distinguished respondents who had attained a moderation drinking goal at eighteen months and at four years from those who achieved an abstinence goal. Orford et al. (1976) also distinguished drinking outcomes by severity of dependence: moderate drinking outcomes were more often found for subjects with low dependence as measured by the two category rating of severity described above. When a ten year follow-up of this cohort was conducted (Edwards et al. 1983), eight subjects were found to be engaging in social drinking of whom seven scored below 30 on the SADQ (range of possible scores: 0-60) (Stockwell et al. 1979), while the eighth subject who was found to be engaging in ‘social drinking’ had a higher dependence score of 36. However, the problem with using this study in support of the predictive validity of dependence is that dependence was rated at follow-up using the SADQ, which was not available at the time these study participants were first assessed. The rationale is that the SADQ initially measured lifetime dependence with the implicit assumption that if one had once been dependent one must not only still be dependent but must still be experiencing the same degree of dependence. It is in the face of such evidence that the plea made by Rankin et al. (1980) for considering the degree of dependence in experiments on controlled drinking (and equally in clinical practice) was made.
In a further study (Rankin et al. 1982) demonstrating the effect of degree of dependence on the perception of cues for drinking, respondents were presented with a list of 33 situations that comprised social situations, positive mood states, negative mood states, high arousal situations, low arousal situations, drink-related situations, adverse physical states and withdrawal states and were asked how frequently they would drink if faced with these situations. They were asked to rate their responses on a four point scale ranging from ‘hardly ever’ to ‘nearly always’. When the results were
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