The hypothesis that among clinical samples of substance abusers blacks score lower than whites on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was supported when comparing 494 white and 159 black male veterans seeking treatment for polydrug abuse. Blacks scored lower on the Depression, Hysteria, Psychopathic Deviate, and Psychasthenia scales when age, education, socioeconomic status, and intelligence were controlled. The findings do not support the notion of ethnic bias in the MMPI. Rather, the results underscore the need for identifying moderator variables that differentially interact to produce in comparison to whites, lower black profiles among substance abusers but higher black profiles among psychiatric patients.
Researchers recently have resurrected the relevance of the addiction-prone personality hypothesis for explaining drug abuse by faulting previous studies for failing to control non-drug-related subject background characteristics. This notion was tested by comparing Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory clinical and content scores of polydrug and heroin abusers under conditions in which covariates were controlled and not controlled. The covariates age, education, socioeconomic status, and admission status interacted significantly but did not change results. Polydrug abusers consistently scored higher than heroin users on clinical scales, but differences for multivariate analyses of variance and covariance were either not significant or not large enough to be clinically meaningful. The most compelling argument against the addiction-prone personality hypothesis was not marginal between-group personality differences, such as the trend in content scale analysis for heroin users to score higher on authority conflict and polydrug abusers to score higher on organic symptoms. Rather, the extraordinary variety of personality types found for both heroin and polydrug abusers was interpreted as unequivocally refuting the notion that one personality type is addiction-prone. Contributions of personality to drug abuse remain suspected but as yet unspecified.
Questions have been raised about voluntarism effects in personality research among heroin addicts. Heroin addicts volunteering for treatment tend to yield more elevated group Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory profiles than heroin addicts who do not volunteer. Such observations have occurred primarily with white samples, however. The present study extended the test of the voluntarism hypothesis to black heroin users, comparing 157 volunteers with 27 nonvolunteers. As hypothesized, black volunteers differed significantly, scoring higher on the Hypochondriasis, Depression, and Hysteria scales. Such differences add evidence against the addiction-prone personality hypothesis and underscore the need for evaluating the effects of voluntarism and ethnicity in personality research on drug abuse.
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