Yale Seeks to Help People Reduce Excessive Porn Use

STUDYLAND—Yale researchers put 21 questions before 1,298 people who all admitted to watching various amounts of porn in an attempt to isolate effective methods for curtailing excessive pornography usage. According to Yale Daily News, "The study, which will be published [in] the January edition of Addictive Behaviors, found that pornography users who had not previously tried to cut down on usage had higher levels of self-efficacy—self-confidence in their ability to follow through on a specific task—than those who had tried to curb the habit multiple times. Likewise, participants who were categorized as 'hypersexual' had lower self-efficacy than those who were categorized as 'non-hypersexual.'" One of the lead authors, Shane Kraus, a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Medicine, indicated that he thought the results could be used by people seeking to reduce their porn use without having to forgo it altogether, and said, per YDN, that "researchers applied ideas and strategies from work on traditional substance use disorders." Each of the questions put before the respondents was, according to YDN, "a strategy participants could use to decrease their own pornography usage," with users rating "their confidence from 0 percent ('Not At All Confident') to 100 percent ('Completely Confident') in using each strategy successfully. Strategies ranged from 'record the date and the length of time you spent watching porn after each session' to 'do not keep a large stash of porn available' to 'use a computer only when someone else close by can see the monitor.' Kraus said that these strategies were drawn from his experiences as a clinical psychiatrist, and mirror harm reduction strategies. "After administering the initial 21-item questionnaire,," the article continued, "the researchers dropped 13 items that received extremely high self-efficacy ratings, overlapped significantly with other items or were not true self-control mechanisms. The questionnaire’s remaining eight items were used to assess participants’ confidence in their ability to cut down on porn usage." While the Yale researchers indicate that the results could be used right away as "a new tool for scientists studying disordered pornography use," other scientists indicated to YDN that the questionnaire is actually a first step in a complicated process. “It’s a questionnaire design study, so it’s not particularly making any strong claims," said Nicole Prause, a research scientist at UCLA. "In general I like the broad approach when people don’t make these strong statements. I’m always concerned when people jump in and talk about sex addiction, as if it were a thing that exists when it clearly does not have good support and certainly isn’t in any diagnostic manuals.” Lead author Carolyn Tompsett, a professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University, countered that they do not refer to pornography as either an addiction or a disorder, but told Yale Daily News, “For some people, [pornography] can be destructive and maybe [they] need some help to reduce their behaviors. Whatever you want to call it, if it’s negatively impacting their life, then they probably need some help.” Prause, who, as AVN has previously reported, has herself co-authored (and authored) studies critical of the "pornography addiction model," told YDN that "because individuals often attempt to reconcile their own behavior with what they report in studies, she wished to see the study bolstered by performance data, with participants actually seeing whether these strategies worked, and reporting back." Co-author Kraus said he, too, "was interested in having the study replicated with participants who were actively seeking treatment, while Tompsett said she wanted to see if participants with high self-efficacy would actually reduce porn use."