A study of drug abuse and cognitive style

Purpose: The purpose of this study was twofold: first, to investigate the relationship between cognitive style and drug abuse; second, to determine if the MMPI would distinguish between persons who had drug abuse and those who had not. The primary concerns of this study were (1) the extent to which cognitive style would distinguish between incarcerated persons who had abused drugs and those who had not; (2) the relationship between cognitive style and the type of drugs an incarcerated person had used; (3) the relationship between scores on the MMPI and drug abuse; (4) the relationship between scores on the MMPI and the type of drugs a person had abused. Methods: The methods used to obtain data for this study were (1) randomly selecting one tenth of the inmate population of the Texas Department of Corrections; (2) administering the Rod-Frame Test to each subject that was available during the testing period; (3) collecting MMPI scores on each subject from the Texas department of Corrections’ files; (4) selecting from the original sample, each subject who had abused drugs and correlating various factors of drug abuse with the MMPI and cognitive style information. Findings: Interpretation of the data in this study suggests the following conclusions: 1. The inmate population of the Texas department of Correlations demonstrates a passive global perceptual style. 2. There was no significant difference between the perceptual styles of incarcerated persons who had abused drugs and those who had not. 3. Determining perceptual style was not an effective means of distinguishing the type of drugs an incarcerated person had abused. 4. There was no significant difference between scores on the MMPI and abuse of drugs by incarcerated persons. 5. The type of drugs an incarcerated person had abused was not indicated by scores on the MMPI.