A new study in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors has found that perceived addiction to pornography—that is, “feeling addicted to Internet pornography irrespective of actual pornography use”—is associated with forms of psychological distress including depression, anxiety, anger, and stress. Pornography use itself, the authors found, was “relatively unrelated to psychological distress.”
In other words, porn addiction may not be real but believing in pornography addiction could be associated with—and may even contribute to—genuine psychological problems.
Lead author Joshua P. Grubbs at Case Western Reserve University has previously shown that “religiosity was robustly predictive of perceived addiction”—another finding that deflates the idea that psychological distress associated with porn use should be treated under an addiction framework. In this new study, Grubbs and his team moved from studying predictors of perceived porn addiction to analyzing its possible effects.
2015-09-23