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Adicción a la pornografía: interferencia atencional y gravedad del consumo
August 2019
DOI: 10.17060/ijodaep.2019.n1.v4.1550
LicenseCC BY-NC-ND 4.0
V. Cervigón Carrasco, Jesús Castro-Calvo, Beatriz Gil, JuliáBeatriz, Gil Juliá, Rafael Ballester-Arnal, Rafael Ballester-Arnal
ABSTRACT
Pornography addiction: attention interference and severity of behavior.
Introduction: The increased use of Information and Comunication Tecnologies (ICT) and internet in our society has boosted new forms of addiction. Because of its public health concerns, one of the most important is cybersex addiction, and in particular excessive and problematic pornography consumption. Large number of studies pointed out that in some people, pornography viewing can be excessive and uncontrolled, creating several problems in different areas of life. For this reason, it is important to explore the underlying factors and maintainers in this problem. It is postulated that one of these factors could be the pornographic content ability to attract and consume attention resources (cue reactivity). The purpose of this study is to explore the relation between the attention interference created by the pornography contents viewing and severity of this behaviour.
Method: To assess this attentional bias, we developed and applied an experimental task to a group of participants whose age oscillates between 18 and 35 years old. The experimental task was based on a Stroop task paradigm: participants concurrently answer to this attentional task when they were exposed to four types of contents (pornographic video, sitcom, video game and a low interactive content -a man reading a newspaper-). Participants received the premise of ignoring videos and focusing on answer quickly and accurately the Stroop task.
Results: Level of attention interference created by pornography compared to other contents was assessed through the comparison between average reaction times and right answer and mistakes of each trial. These results, where we showed significant differences between the experimental conditions, will be exposed in detail during the presentation of the study.
Conclusions: This study supports, on the one hand, the big ability of the different multimedia contents (among them, pornography), to attract and consume attentional resources; on the other hand, it also highlights the strong relation with the ability of attention interference that have their addictive potential. Therefore, it is important to include new clinical approaches that address this aspect at different levels: prevention, assessment, and treatment.
Keywords: pornography addiction; attentional bias; young people
POSTER
More and more noticeably, behavioral addictions are taking over from toxic ones in terms of socio-sanitary relevance:
✓ The DSM-5 and the latest revision of the WHO International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) recognize video game addiction as a full-fledged clinical picture.
✓ Compulsive sexual behavior has also been recognized as a clinical picture by ICD-11 (impulse control disorders).
✓ The popularity of platforms such as Netflix and the large amount of time that people devote to it has led to the question of whether watching TV series can be addictive.
◊ People with behavioral addictions show great cognitive reactivity (e.g., attentional interference) to the object of their addiction, which is known as “cue reactivity”.
◊ Therefore, attentional interference from exposure to potentially addictive stimuli should predict the degree of severity of these behaviors
Analyze whether the degree of cognitive interference caused by exposure to potentially addictive stimuli correlates with indicators of excessive and problematic consumption.
Experimental task of cognitive interference (computer-assisted):
✓ 1st Completion of a Stroop task without concurrent stimulation (control condition).
✓ 2nd Completion of a Stroop task during exposure to potentially addictive stimuli.
✓ Attentional interference = in average reaction times (TR) with respect to control condition.
◊ Indicators of excessive and problematic consumption (self-report):
✓ Frequency of consumption of: (1) pornography; (2) TV series; and (3) video games.
✓ Severity of pornography consumption: Internet Sex Screening Test (SST).
✓ Severity of the consumption of TV series: Binge-Watching Engagement and Symptoms (BWESQ).
✓ Severity of video game consumption: Internet Gaming Disorder Test (IGDT-10).
As it was hypothesized, participants with more severe (not more frequent) pornography consumption showed greater interference
cognitive when completing a Stroop task while viewing pornography.
◊ The most common users of video games (not the most problematic users) also showed a higher level of interference during
Stroop task when it was completed during exposure to video games.
◊ Neither the frequency nor the severity of the consumption of TV series correlates with the degree of cognitive interference during viewing.
◊ It is partially confirmed that exposure to addictive behaviors that interferes with cognitive processing
DISCUSSION
Throughout this study we have tried to explore the capacity of sexual keys, in this case in the form of pornographic videos, to interfere and affect attention and processing of other stimular keys: that is, the effect that pornography can get to generate in various and varied cognitive and executive functions, with the purpose to explain perseverance and the inability to interrupt consumption and behavior that are generating a series of conflicts and problems in the sex addict’s life on-line. Specifically, it has tried to draw and draw the relationship between the sumo of this one, for which a widely validated and replicated paradigm has been used as it is the one of the attention task Stroop. To do this, 58 participants aged between 18 and 35 years were recruited and performed an ad hoc experimental task to evaluate this effect. The selection of this age range was not random, but several studies suggest that the population Young is more linked to all types of OSAs (Egan & Parmar, 2013; Meerkerk, Van Den Eijnden & Garretsen, 2006), so that evaluating this population sector would be greener in order to extrapolate and generalize the results.The data obtained in this study support the starting hypothesis partially. For On the other hand, it has been confirmed that reaction times are significantly longer during the task Stroop concurrent with the display of pornographic content, which means that pornography effectively generates clear cognitive interference. These results are in line with results obtained by Macapagal et. to the. (2011) in his study, in which using the paradigm Go / NoGo has already detected a clear influence of sexual stimuli in the worst processing and lower levels of attention devoted to other stimuli also important but presumably Not as outgoing as sex. These data could be explained by referring to the great activation or arousal that generate the sexual keys associated with their subjective salience and potency (Wéry & Billieux, 2017; Laier, Pawlikowski, Pekal, Schulte & Brand, 2013). However, it was not found that pornographic content influences the number of successes, failures or omissions, whatever I had hypothesized at the beginning and it could not be confirmed, since the differences found were not They are statistically significant.
Although it has not been thoroughly analyzed, in the light of the data obtained it seems that The ability to capture attentional resources is not only given in pornography, but also gives, to a lesser extent and in a moderate way, other content that is rich and interactive for subjects, such as television series, possibly as a source of stimulation, entertainment and evocation of emotions and mental states. Following this premise would fit expect the same from videogames, but in this study no great capacity has been found of attentional reuptake by them. One possible explanation is that video games themselves they have no plot thread that allows the viewer to enter them with their simple visualization, so they would not be very interactive for the subjects. That is, if instead of a video about video games, participants would have had the opportunity to play (that is, expose yourself to the fully immersive capacity of video games), most likely the results They would have been significantly different.A strength of this study is that the participants have included both sexes, which would be relatively new, since traditional research in compulsion and Sexual addiction has been aimed at a male group (presumably) for presenting older prevalences of these, leaving the female collective aside. Therefore, a possible line of study future could be the replication of this same study also attending to the differences by sexes on the impact of pornographic content on cognitive functions. To do this, and in order to obtain greater robustness and weight in the findings, it would be convenient to expand the current sample in both sexes
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