Dissociative symptomatology mediates the relation between posttraumatic stress disorder severity and alcohol‐related problems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Up to 50% of individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) endorse problematic alcohol use. Typically, these individuals present with more complex and often more severe PTSD symptoms than those who do not report problematic alcohol use. Emerging literature suggests that heightened symptoms of dissociation are likewise associated with greater PTSD symptom severity. Despite this knowledge, the role of dissociation in the relation between PTSD severity and alcohol-related problems has yet to be examined. Here, we explore the mediating role of dissociative symptomatology on the association between PTSD severity and alcohol-related problems within a PTSD treatment-seeking sample. METHODS: Structural equation modeling was used to test the mediating role of dissociative symptomatology between PTSD severity and alcohol-related problems. Participants [N = 334; mean age (SD) = 44.29 (9.77), 50% female] were drawn from a clinical intake battery database for PTSD in-patient treatment services at Homewood Health Care, Guelph, ON, Canada. A subset of battery measures assessing PTSD severity, dissociative symptomatology, and alcohol-related problems were submitted to analysis. RESULTS: A significant positive association emerged between PTSD severity and alcohol-related problems (β = 0.127, p < 0.05) in the absence of dissociative symptomatology. Critically, however, when added to this model, dissociative symptomatology (six unique facets of dissociation assessed by the Multiscale Dissociation Inventory) mediated the relation between PTSD severity and alcohol-related problems. Specifically, greater PTSD severity was associated with greater dissociative symptomatology (β = 0.566, p < 0.0001), which was in turn associated with greater alcohol-related problems (β = 0.184, p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that dissociative symptomatology plays a key role in explaining the relation between PTSD severity and alcohol-related problems. Future studies should examine the impact of targeting dissociative symptomatology specifically in treating individuals with PTSD who endorse alcohol-related problems.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".