Pretreatment MMPI profiles of A.A. members and nonmembers

Historically, researchers in alcoholism have focused a large amount of energy on the search for "the alcoholic personality." From this effort to identify a particular type of personality prone to the development of alcoholism arose the idea that alcoholics are not a homogeneous group. Subsequently, a number of authors reported the existence of alcoholic subtypes. Recently, research has begun to examine the relationship of personality to treatment outcome. In particular, Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) has come under greater scrutiny since high success rates have been ascribed to A.A. attendance. Moreover, the personality characteristics of A.A. members have been compared to alcoholics not attending A.A. Improving on earlier studies, the present research compared the pretreatment Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) profiles of alcoholics who later elected to attend A.A. and those who did not attend. Additionally, alcoholics attending A.A. were sorted by drinking outcome and the MMPI profiles of sober and drinking A.A. members were contrasted. Although no personality differences emerged between A.A. attenders and nonmembers, there were several trends within the A.A. attending group, suggesting that successful A.A. members were less depressed, less anxious and less socially isolated than unsuccessfull A.A. members.