Too (Psychologically) Close for Comfort? Comparing Verbal Immediacy among Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOAs) and Non-ACOAs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOAs) have shown poorer psychosocial outcomes compared to their counterparts (non-ACOAs). These poorer outcomes, however, are not consistently present between groups. Investigating psychological markers of such functioning can help to highlight nuances between ACOAs and non-ACOAs even when mean differences of psychosocial outcomes are not present. This is pertinent to the study of ACOAs to understand predictors of positive well-being trajectories. OBJECTIVE: The aim of the present study was to compare the linguistic content of ACOAs and non-ACOAs in relation to psychological functioning. METHOD: A quasi-experimental design was employed; ACOAs (n = 53) and non-ACOAs (n = 80) were asked to write a significant memory in which they went through a change of some kind (i.e., turning point) regarding a parent. Participants were then asked to complete measures of psychological functioning. Using a word counting software, we identified verbal immediacy, a combination of words signifying psychological closeness, within participants' memories. RESULTS: Results indicated no mean differences in the amount of verbal immediacy amid ACOAs and non-ACOAs, but there were differences in its predictive ability between groups. Among ACOAs, verbal immediacy predicted better psychological functioning. Yet, there was no association found among non-ACOAs. Conclusions/Importance: These results show that psychological closeness, among ACOAs, is indicative of better psychological functioning, even though it is typically associated with worse outcomes. This suggests that vulnerable individuals may have nontraditional correlates between psychological markers, like verbal immediacy, and such functioning and should be assessed when comparing these populations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".