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Published October 14, 2020 | Version v1
Journal article Open

Pulling for pleasure? Erotic approach-bias associated with porn use, not problems

  • 1. Addiction Development and Psychopathology (ADAPT) lab, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Department of Psychology, Paris-Lodron-University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria; Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Paris-Lodron-University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
  • 2. Addiction Development and Psychopathology (ADAPT) lab, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Department of Child Development and Education, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia
  • 3. Department of Psychology, Paris-Lodron-University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria; Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Paris-Lodron-University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
  • 4. Addiction Development and Psychopathology (ADAPT) lab, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Center for Urban Mental Health, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Description

Background and Objectives: Addictive behaviors are gaining recognition in the clinical community, leading to more attention for the effects of problematic porn use. As many addictive behaviors are characterized by automatically activated approach-tendencies for disorder-relevant stimuli, we tested whether such tendencies are also present for erotic images and whether these are related to problematic porn use.

Methods: Measuring approach-bias for erotic photographs, sixty-two healthy heterosexual and bisexual men completed both a relevant-feature and an irrelevant-feature approach-avoidance task (AAT). Half of participants operated a joystick as response device, the other half a keyboard. We recorded participants’ number of weekly porn-viewing sessions and symptoms of problematic porn use.

Results: The irrelevant-feature AAT produced unreliable results and was not analyzed further. In the relevant-feature AAT, participants had an overall approach-bias towards erotic stimuli. Porn use frequency, but not problematic porn use, was associated with with greater erotic approach-bias. This relationship was stronger when measured with a joystick than with a keyboard.

Limitations: Our design did not allow to test the causal direction of the relationship between porn use and approach-bias, and our results cannot be generalized to women, non-heterosexual men, and clinical populations.

Conclusions: Similar to other addictive behaviors and substances, we found a positive relation between porn use and approach-bias. Future studies using the relevant-feature AAT will likely benefit from using the joystick rather than the keyboard.

Notes

Sercan Kahveci was supported by the Doctoral College "Imaging the Mind" (FWF; W1233-B).

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