Decades of studies from respected academic institutions, have demonstrated significant impacts of porn consumption for individuals, relationships, and society. "What’s the Research" aims to shed light on the expanding field of academic resources that showcase porn’s harms in a variety of ways. Below are selected excerpts from published studies on this issue.
The full study can be accessed here.
Associations between Fluctuating Shame, Self-Esteem, and Sexual Desire: Comparing Frequent Porn Users and a General Population Sample
Authors: Piet van Tuijl, Peter Verboon, and Jacques J. D. M. van Lankveld
Published: January 2022
Peer-Reviewed Journal: Sexes
Background
In the present study, we explore the proposed cyclic models for problematic hypersexuality (PH) that involve shame, self-esteem, and sexual desire.
These cyclic models are characterized by temporal associations but have not been investigated previously with intensive longitudinal designs. In this study, we collected up to 70 measurements per participant within a period of seven consecutive days, which allowed us to investigate associations between fluctuations of shame, self-esteem, and sexual desire.
Methods
For 7 consecutive days and 10 moments per day participants were asked to complete a brief questionnaire.
Participants received a wristwatch and seven diary booklets, with each booklet having 10 copies of the same questionnaire. For both samples ten time-windows of 90 min between 7:30 and 22:30 were constructed and at random timepoints within each window, a beep signal sounded to prompt completion of the questionnaire.
The questionnaire consisted of 38 (first sample) or 31 (second sample) short questions measuring, among other aspects, the participant’s self-esteem, sexual desire, and sexual activity.
Results
This study showed that for individuals who do not experience PH, momentary sexual desire is related to feeling good about oneself, while for men with PH this positive association is not found.
Furthermore, our results implicated that among the men with PH, shame forecasted an increase in sexual desire one to two hours later, while individuals without PH showed no associations between shame and sexual desire… We propose that the difference in emotion regulation between PH and no PH is characterized by a split.
On the one side we find people afflicted by PH who experience less sex-positive effects and who use sexual desire to downregulate feelings of shame; on the other side we find people not afflicted by PH, who will generally experience that an increase in sexual desire coincides with feeling good about oneself and for whom sexual desire is not related to shame.
The full study can be accessed here.
Support this resource
Thanks for taking the time to read through this article! As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, we're able to create resources like this through the support of people like you. Will you help to keep our educational resources free as we produce resources that raise awareness on the harms of porn and sexual exploitation?
DONATE