New research published in Sexual Health & Compulsivity indicates that people with clinical levels of love addiction experience more severe relationship anxiety than those who are simply at risk. The study also found that both at-risk individuals and clinical patients share similar difficulties in regulating their emotions, suggesting that love addiction exists on a spectrum where intense attachment anxiety marks the transition into a clinical problem.
Love addiction is a pattern of obsessive and dependent involvement in a romantic relationship. For someone experiencing this condition, a romantic relationship becomes the absolute center of their life. They tend to constantly seek approval, reassurance, and closeness from their partner, often at the expense of friendships, work, and personal interests.
This intense focus persists even when it causes immense emotional distress or negative consequences in other areas of life. Historically, researchers have debated how to classify this condition, with some viewing it as a behavioral addiction similar to gambling, and others understanding it as an attachment issue rooted in an excessive fear of abandonment.
Because love addiction does not currently have standardized diagnostic criteria in psychiatric manuals, mental health professionals often face challenges in identifying and treating it. This prompted the researchers to adopt a bottom-up approach, meaning they looked at the psychological dimensions, such as emotional, personality, and relational traits, as they naturally occur in people, rather than trying to fit the participants into rigid, predefined diagnostic boxes.
“Love Addiction is increasingly discussed both clinically and in the general public, but there is still considerable debate about what it actually represents,” study author Patrizia Velotti, director of the Emotions, Regulation and Relationships LAB and a full professor of clinical psychology at Sapienza University of Rome, told PsyPost. “Rather than assuming from the outset that it is simply a behavioral addiction, we wanted to examine the psychological processes associated with it from a bottom-up perspective, looking simultaneously at emotion regulation, personality functioning, and relational processes.”
A 2024 study indicated that people at risk for love addiction struggle more with controlling their emotions and forming secure relationships than healthy individuals. In addition, research covered by PsyPost in 2026 suggested that emotional dependence and love addiction feature distinct psychological profiles. Following this, a 2025 meta-analysis found that people struggling with love addiction consistently show high rates of insecure, anxious attachment to their romantic partners. A 2023 study also showed that an overwhelming fear of rejection and abandonment strongly predicts love addiction, especially when paired with low self-worth.
These earlier studies established that love addiction is linked to emotional distress and insecure relationship patterns, prompting researchers to test whether these psychological traits worsen step by step as people move from mild risk to severe clinical dependency. The researchers conducted the new study to examine these emotional, personality, and relational processes across different levels of love addiction severity.
“We were particularly interested in understanding whether people identified as at risk through self-report measures and those identified clinically would show similar or different psychological profiles,” Velotti said.
To investigate these differences, the research team recruited 152 adults in Italy, with an average age of about 33. The participants were divided into three groups based on their relationship struggles. The first group consisted of 70 people with no risk of love addiction. The second group included 53 individuals who were identified as being at risk for love addiction based on their high scores on a self-report questionnaire that evaluates addiction-like behaviors, such as experiencing withdrawal symptoms when away from a partner or having the relationship conflict with daily life. The third group consisted of 29 patients who were actively receiving clinical treatment for difficulties related to love addiction, as identified by mental health professionals.
All participants completed a battery of surveys. To assess emotional regulation, the researchers used a scale that measures how well individuals accept negative emotions, control their impulses, and maintain awareness of their feelings when upset. To evaluate personality functioning, the participants answered questions about their sense of identity, self-direction, empathy, and capacity for intimacy. A strong sense of self-direction involves being able to set and pursue meaningful goals, while intimacy involves maintaining deep and mutually respectful connections with others.
Finally, the researchers measured relational variables by assessing the participants’ levels of attachment anxiety and their ability to recognize and make sense of their emotions specifically within the context of an intimate relationship. The researchers controlled for the participants’ age and gender when analyzing the results to ensure these demographic factors did not skew the findings.
Cavalli and her team found that both the at-risk group and the clinical group reported substantially more difficulty managing their emotions compared to the non-risk group. People in both risk groups struggled to regulate negative emotional states, suggesting that they might use their romantic relationship as a maladaptive way to soothe their own emotional distress.
“One aspect we consider particularly important is that the relationship itself may function as a means of regulating difficult emotional states,” Velotti noted. “In this sense, problematic romantic involvement may be better understood not only in terms of compulsive behavior, but also in terms of what the relationship is psychologically being used to regulate.”
They also showed similar impairments in personality functioning, reporting more difficulties with their own sense of self and their interpersonal relationships than the non-risk group. However, there was no statistically significant difference in general emotional regulation or personality functioning between the at-risk individuals and the clinical patients. Both groups shared these underlying psychological vulnerabilities.
“One particularly interesting finding was how similar the at-risk and clinical groups were on several psychological dimensions,” Velotti explained. “This suggests that the transition toward clinically significant difficulties may not simply reflect a general increase in psychopathology; relational processes, and particularly attachment anxiety, may be especially important in understanding severity.”
The relational measures, on the other hand, showed a progressive worsening across the three groups. The researchers observed that attachment anxiety steadily increased depending on the severity of the love addiction. The non-risk group reported the lowest levels of relationship anxiety, the at-risk group reported moderate levels, and the clinical group reported the highest levels. This indicates that an intense fear of abandonment and an excessive need for reassurance are specific markers of severe, clinical love addiction.
“The most clinically informative finding was not simply that the clinical group showed ‘more problems’ across every dimension,” Velotti told PsyPost. “Emotional dysregulation and personality difficulties were already clearly elevated in the at-risk group… whereas anxious attachment showed a clear progressive increase and was highest in the clinical group.”
In terms of emotional regulation within the relationship itself, both the at-risk and clinical groups showed reduced awareness and clarity regarding their emotions when interacting with their partners compared to the non-risk group. The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024 and a study covered by PsyPost in 2025, which consistently found that higher levels of insecure, anxious attachment are strongly associated with a greater severity of love addiction. They also align with research covered by PsyPost in 2026, which linked romantic relationship addiction to greater emotion regulation difficulties.
“The main message is that Love Addiction should not simply be understood as ‘loving too much,'” Velotti noted. “What appears to distinguish problematic forms of romantic involvement is a broader pattern involving difficulties in regulating emotions, impairments in self and interpersonal functioning, and, especially, difficulties related to attachment and emotional functioning within intimate relationships.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these results. “I would strongly caution against interpreting our findings as evidence that intense romantic attachment is itself pathological, or that Love Addiction is already an established diagnostic category,” Velotti said. “The construct remains debated, and our results are better understood as evidence for a dimensional and relational pattern of difficulties rather than for a discrete disorder.”
The study relied on a relatively small number of clinical patients, which makes it harder to generalize the findings to everyone who experiences severe love addiction. The participants were also overwhelmingly female, meaning that the relationship dynamics observed might not fully capture how this condition affects men. Because the research took place at a single point in time, it cannot show whether anxious attachment causes love addiction or if the addiction itself fuels the anxiety.
Future research will need to follow people over time to better understand how these relationship struggles develop. “Our next goal is to move beyond the question of whether Love Addiction resembles other behavioral addictions and develop a more integrated model of the phenomenon,” Velotti said. “Ultimately, this could also help improve assessment and inform interventions that target the underlying psychological and relational mechanisms rather than focusing only on the overt compulsive behavior.”
The study, “Psychological and Psychopathological Features of Love Addiction: A Cross-Sectional Study,” was authored by Roberta Gabriella Cavalli, Arianna Teverini, Viviana Ferrà, and Patrizia Velotti.