New research in Addictive Behaviors has found evidence that pornography use among young heterosexual women is associated with an approach bias, meaning the tendency to move certain stimuli toward the body rather than away from it.
“Our lab is interested in studying the behavioral, cognitive, and neural correlates of both substance addictions and behavioral addictions, such as pornography use, gambling, and video game use,” said study authors Skyler Sklenarik and Robert Astur of the University of Connecticut.
“Indeed, growing research suggests that there is substantial behavioral and neural overlap in how substance and behavioral addictions are processed. Given previous studies demonstrating that biased cognitive processing contributes to many substance addictions, we aimed to explore whether cognitive biases also play a role in problematic pornography use.”
In the study, 121 female undergraduates filled out questionnaire regarding their sexuality, pornography use, and other factors. They then completed a computerized approach-avoidance task, in which they were instructed to pull back on a joystick to approach pictures that were displayed in portrait format or push the joystick forward to avoid pictures displayed in landscape format. The participants were asked to respond as quickly as possible.
Pulling the joystick caused the picture to continuously enlarge in size, while pushing the joystick caused the picture to continuously decrease in size until it disappeared. The pictures included 50 erotic images and 50 neutral images of common household items, such as a lamp or a clock.
The researchers found that women who used pornography tended to be faster to approach than to avoid erotic images during the computerized task. But this approach bias was not observed with regard to neutral images.
“Our findings show that pornography use can result in behavioral changes and automatic processing similar to what is observed with substance addictions. Additionally, our findings challenge the assumption that pornography use is largely a male phenomenon — rather, our study provides evidence that many females use pornography as well, and that like men, some women experience problems related to their use,” Sklenarik and Astur told PsyPost.
“One caveat is that our studies are conducting with undergraduates, so it is unclear how well these phenomena generalize to other populations. Going forward, we would like to use these findings to design and implement potential treatments aimed at reducing problematic pornography use. For example, it is possible to design modified versions of the task used in our study to retrain maladaptive cognitive processing of erotic pictures, which may, in turn, result in the reduction of real-life problematic pornography use.”
“This research is in its infancy, but clearly, behavioral addictions can be as harmful as substance addictions, and most addictions can affect humans from all walks of life. With the growing use of cell phones, internet, video games, binge watching and other common behaviors, it seems imperative to develop effective interventions to treat behavioral addictions, and we hope that our research makes a meaningful impact to help achieve this goal,” the researchers added.
The study, “Approach bias for erotic stimuli among heterosexual female college students who use pornography“, was authored by Skyler Sklenarik, Marc N. Potenza, Mateusz Gola, and Robert S. Astur.