Addiction Studies – Why Pornography Harms

You can also read this article in the book edited by Stefan Kiesbye, At Issue: Child Pornography. New York: GALE-Cengage Learning, April 2013.

“There’s no harm in it, I’m just looking.”

For quite some time, men have defended their addiction to pornography by saying that they are just using it and not acting on it. But is pornography really as harmless as they would like us to believe?

Pornography Consumption and Sexual Abuse

In a study done by Andres Hernandez (2000), director of the Sex Offender Treatment Program in the US  Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, he found out that majority of offenders convicted of Internet sexual crimes (specifically child pornography) have similar behavioral characteristics with those convicted of child molestation.

In fact, he said, 76 percent of offenders convicted with Child Pornography had “contact sexual crimes” and seemed to have committed sexual offenses more (i.e., 30.5 victims per offender) than those who were convicted outright of contact sexual crimes.

Results of a more recent study by Hernandez (2009) have also shown that a lot of Internet child pornography offenders are also child molesters.

How Pornography Addiction Works

Psychologists have long debated about the appropriateness of associating pornography with addiction, pointing out that there are no diagnostic criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) regarding porn consumption.

Other mental health professionals and neurology researchers, however, strongly agree that those who are hooked on pornography behave like addicts and should be treated as one.

Mary Anne Layden, PhD, for example, said that increasing tolerance to addictive substances is a key feature of addiction. Porn addicts develop this, needing more and more pornography materials (increasing either the intensity or the frequency of use, or both) to get the same high.

To understand this tolerance better, brain scanning technologies have been used through the years to provide an objective measure of how addiction affects the brain. Unlike self-reports which are highly subjective and difficult to collect, tools like the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can look directly into the brain and “read” how addictive substances—including pornography—affect it.

Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), is the pioneer when it comes to brain imaging studies. Her papers established how addictions physically alter the brain’s physiology through changes in the neurochemical composition of the brain’s frontal regions.

These areas are responsible for regulating the motivation, drive, and pleasure impulses, and determine how addicted people think and feel when exposed to addictive substances.

Use of the fMRI in Addiction Studies

The fMRI had been discovered in the early 1990s but it only became increasingly used in addiction studies a decade later. It functions the same way as the MRI—a tool using a strong magnetic field and radio waves—but instead of taking pictures of the body’s organs and tissues, it tracks the brain’s blood flow.

Researchers using the fMRI to study psychological phenomena monitor changes in the brain’s blood flow while the research participants are subjected to a specific stimulus—a pornographic image, for example, in the case of a porn addict. The results would then show which parts of the brain are activated when the stimulus is shown.

Addiction is a Brain Disease

Years of research work at the NIDA using the fMRI has shown that instead of just being a compulsion, addiction is a brain disease. Continued exposure to addictive substances—such as food, drugs, alcohol, or pornography materials—releases neurochemicals that rewire pathways in the brain and affects decision making. It results in increased cravings for the substance and creates a dependency that requires more stimulation.

Studies have shown, for example, that it is the brain’s frontal lobes which are affected by these chemicals.  When there is a pleasurable stimulus, the brain releases dopamine, which then activates the brain’s reward center and produces pleasurable feelings.

With a porn addict’s continued exposure to these stimuli, there is a reduction in the amount of dopamine, resulting to the increased demand for the chemical.

The addicted person, whose dopamine receptors are already desensitized, must then find ways to increase the dopamine levels in the brain to feel good. In the case of porn addicts, more and more extreme pornography materials become needed through time to produce pleasure.

Changes in the brain due to pornography addiction can also be explained through studies on learning and memory. Julie Malenka and Robert Kauer (2007) called these “long term potentiation” and “long term depression,” where brain cells are changed and rewired with the constant search and evaluation of pornographic materials.

Findings of another study (2007) done in Germany on pedophilia showed that brain changes in pedophiles are similar to those who are addicted to substance abuse and food, providing further evidence that sexual compulsions including porn addiction can cause changes in the brain.

Implications to Treatment

There are a lot more studies showing the connection between addiction and how it changes the brain. What does this all imply, in relation to treatment?

Researchers say that if porn addiction is a disease, it follows that it can be treated. But treatment doesn’t start without recognition and admission on the part of the person that he or she has a problem with pornography.

However, the need for recognition that pornography harms should not only stop with the individual; the society needs to do it as well, for any global effort to curb the effects of pornography to be effective.

References:

Bourke, M., & Hernandez, A. (2009). The ‘Butner Study’ redux: A report of the incidence of hands-on child victimization by child pornography offenders. Journal of Family Violence, 24(3).

Downs, M.F. (2007). Is pornography addictive? Psychologists debate whether people can have an addiction to pornography. Retrieved from Is Pornography Addictive?

Hernandez, A.E. (2000). Self-reported contact sexual offenses by participants in the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Sex Offender Treatment Program: Implications for internet sex Offenders. Annual Conference Research and Treatment Conference of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. San Diego, CA.

Hilton Jr, D.E. (2010). As a swallowed bait: How pornography addicts and changes the brain. Stand for the Family Symposium. Brigham Young University Law School.

Hilton Jr, D.E. (2011). Can pornography use become an actual brain addiction? Retrieved from Can Pornography Use Become an Actual Brain Addiction?

Kauer, J.A., & Malenka, R.C. (2007). Synaptic plasticity and addiction. Nature Reviews, 8.

Schiffer, B., et al. (2007). Structural brain abnormalities in the Frontostriatal System and Cerebellum in pedophilia. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 41(9).

Volkow, N.D., Fowler, J.S., & Wang, G.J. (2004). The addicted human brain viewed in the light of imaging studies: Brain circuits and treatment strategies. Neuropharmacology, 47(1).

This was originally published in PushofHope.com on 18 May 2011. The site has closed. This is ©Aleah Taboclaon and may not be reproduced without the author’s permission.