It doesn’t matter how often you watch porn. What matters is whether or not you think you have an uncontrollable problem, according to a recent study published in the Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, a peer-reviewed journal. Perceived addiction to X-rated material is a better predictor of psychological distress than pornography use itself, the study found.
Researchers who conducted the study set out to explore the relationship between watching pornography and personal well-being. First, they surveyed more than 700 porn-watching adults about their relationship to explicit adult material, and found that participants’ beliefs that they had porn addictions significantly predicted bad feelings including anger, anxiety, depression and stress. (That held true even when researchers controlled for personality traits that might underlie both perceived addiction and psychological distress.) Pornography use itself only had a weak association with anger.
The study was replicated with more than 1,000 undergraduates, and researchers followed-up with a subset of those participants a year later. They found a similar relationship between perceived addiction and psychological distress. The findings “imply that links between use and distress are likely accomplished through perceived addiction,” the study says.
This builds on another recent study by some of the same researchers that found that religiosity and moral disapproval, but not actual frequency of watching X-rated films, predicted perceived porn addiction.
In the latest study, the researchers concluded, “Although concerns about links between pornography use and psychological distress may be warranted, these concerns would be better focused on individuals’ attitudes toward their own use, rather than on the use itself.”