Development of the OCDS-Revised: A Measure of Alcohol and Drug Urges With Outpatient Substance Abuse Clients.

Urges to use substances is an important construct in understanding the maintenance of substance use as well as relapse. There is a need to evaluate single instruments measuring global urges to use substances (including alcohol). The Obsessive Compulsive Drinking Scale (OCDS; R. F. Anton, D. H. Moak, & P. Latham, 1995) was revised and tested as a single measure of urges to use substances. Participants were 252 adults entering outpatient substance abuse treatment. Results suggest that the revised scale (OCDS-R) primarily assesses 1 global factor for urges to use substances. In addition, strong support was found for the reliability and concurrent validity of the OCDS-R, although results for its predictive validity were mixed. The OCDS-R is a brief, psychometrically sound self-report instrument that has applicability within clinical and research settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Continuous measurement of visible persistence.

In the synchrony judgment paradigm, Ss judge whether a click precedes or follows the onset of a light flash and, on other trials, whether or not a click precedes light termination. The interclick interval defines the duration of visible persistence. An elaboration of this method was developed that consisted of 2 phases: In Phase 1, the luminance of a reference stimulus was psychophysically matched to the peak brightness of the test flash. Five luminance values between .1 and 1.0 of the reference stimulus were used subsequently. In Phase 2, a random 1 of the 5 reference stimuli, a test flash, and a click were presented; the Ss judged whether the click occurred before or after the brightness of test flash reached the reference value (on onset trials) or decayed below it (on termination trials). This method was validated on 3 male graduate students with test stimuli whose luminance rose and decayed slowly in time, and then was used to trace out the precise subjective rise and decay (temporal brightness response function) of brief flashes. (40 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)