[Prefrontal Symptoms Inventory for clinical evaluation of addictions in everyday life: development process and psychometric properties].

Introduction: Research has provided evidence of the presence of prefrontal symptoms in addicts, although they are usually evaluated using questionnaires that were created for acquired brain injury.

Aims: To produce a specific instrument for evaluating those symptoms in subjects with addictions.

Subjects And Methods: For the study, 1624 participants were recruited (445 addicts and 1179 from the general population) and were given a 100-item inventory to complete based on the three spheres of human activity (cognition, emotion and behaviour) in relation to the three great prefrontal syndromes (dorsolateral, ventromedial and orbital). The preliminary analyses ruled out those that did not prove to have sufficient discriminating power, which resulted in the Prefrontal Symptoms Inventory (PSI) consisting of 46 items. The Dysexecutive Questionnaire (DEX-Sp) and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) were administered in order to study the convergent validity.

Results: The data show the three-factor structure of the questionnaire: problems with executive control (with three sub-factors: problems with motivation, control and attention), problems with social behaviour and problems with emotional control. The relationships between the scores on the PSI and sociodemographic and consumption variables, as well as with the DEX-Sp and the PSS were analysed. A reduced 20-item version is provided for screening.

Conclusions: The PSI relates the ('subject-centred') self-evaluation of persons with the a priori ('brain-centred') theoretical formulation, the results showing adequate psychometric properties. We recommend its use when it comes to exploring the prefrontal symptoms of addicts, as well as other clinical or subclinical populations with similar cognitive profiles.