| Abstract [eng] |
This study was conducted to answer the question weather the specificity, dominating contexts or subjective valency of autobiographical memories of drug addicted men during rehabilitation process differ from the ones of non addicted individuals. For this purpose the half structured interview was made with 16 drug addicted patients in Vilnius Center for Addictive Disorders in long-term rehabilitation department and with 15 non addicted men of the same age. Averagely drug addicted men were 26.56 years old (SD=2.73). The mean age of control group was 24.06 (SD=1,75) years. 186 memories were collected. Independent experts coded these memories using the coding scheme. The coding scheme was made of 4 contexts groups, memories’ specificity/ over-generality assessment, assessment weather they are according to instructions or not. The clinical and the control groups were compared according to the tendencies to remember more specific memories; according to more positive or negative memory assessment tendencies and the tendencies to remember the particular things, themes. The early memories of both groups were compared according to subjective emotional assessment and the contexts dominating. Also the specificity/ over-generality feature of the memories recalled to the key words was compared between the two groups. Also it was important to distinguish dominant contexts, compared to their subjective assessment, and verify the other of their characteristics. It was found that drug addicted individuals have the tendency to have “talks about using drugs/ intoxication” contexts in their early memories. The subjective emotional evaluation of these memories do not differ between the groups. Also it was found that drug addicted individuals tend to remember more over-general memories to emotional key words compared to non addicted men. The subjective evaluation of the memories to negative key words was more negative in clinical group. Memories to the key word “ANGRY” were especially negatively assessed in drug addicted men group. The controls tend to assess these memories more neutrally. 11 contexts were excluded from the addicted individuals’ memories to key words. These contexts can be summarized to 4 more basic categories: addiction, emotion, self representation and interpersonal relationships. It was noticed that drug addicted individuals tend to be more depressive than non addicted ones. For this reason some of the memories’ features can be explained by this tendency. There are too little studies on this theme. Studies conducted in the clinical groups of the purpose to identify weather the memories of drug addicted individuals are over-general or not, showed that drug addicted individuals tend to remember over-generally. So this study could support the findings of the studies made by other authors. The subjective emotional assessment of the memories of drug addicted individuals have not been made before. This study have showed that addiction is linked to autobiographical memory features. Further assessments with more factors controlled are required in order to evaluate more concrete relationships between drug addiction and the features of autobiographical memories. |
