Emotional Involvement in Bipolar Families

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed study will examine emotional involvement/overinvolvement in the relatives of individuals with bipolar disorder. Specifically, this research aims to 1) develop an observational measure that assesses emotional involvement/overinvolvement in the context of bipolar disorder; 2) evaluate the measure's psychometric properties; 3) use the measure to investigate the family environment of bipolar disorder. In particular, the latter aim will involve identifying patient and relative characteristics that are associated with relatives' emotional involvement/overinvolvement and using the construct of emotional involvement/overinvolvement to predict the clinical course of bipolar disorder over time. Taken together, the aims of this investigation will address limitations of the literature on the family context of bipolar disorder in that the proposed investigation focuses on adaptive and maladaptive family involvement in bipolar disorder, an area that has been relatively neglected in the empirical literature on bipolar disorder. Advanced methodological (i.e., observational data coding) and statistical analytic techniques (e.g., structural equation modeling) will facilitate a sophisticated examination of the proposed aims. [unreadable] [unreadable]