How can we conceptualize behavioral addiction without pathologizing common behaviors?

By Daniel Kardefelt-Winther, Alexandre Heeren, Adriano Schimmenti, Antonius J. van Rooij, Pierre Maurage, Michelle Colder Carras, J. Edman, Alex Blaszczynski, Yasser Khazaal, Joël Billieux. Addiction, 2017

708 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Following the recent changes to the diagnostic category for addictive disorders in DSM-5, it is urgent to clarify what constitutes behavioral addiction to have a clear direction for future research and classification. However, in the years following the release of DSM-5, an expanding body of research has increasingly classified engagement in a wide range of common behaviors and leisure activities as possible behavioral addiction. If this expansion does not end, both the relevance and the credibility of the field of addictive disorders might be questioned, which may prompt a dismissive appraisal of the new DSM-5 sub-category for behavioral addiction. We propose an operational definition of behavioral addiction together with a number of exclusion criteria, to avoid pathologizing common behaviors and provide a common ground for further research. The definition and its exclusion criteria are clarified and justified by illustrating how these address a number of theoretical and methodological shortcomings that result from existing conceptualizations. We invite other researchers to extend our definition under an Open Science Foundation framework.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/84c3e0d8b359382a10af6d82eaa112fbf67484ab

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. Kayla B. Hollett
2. Tayana Panova
3. L. Squires
4. Xavier Carbonell
5. Jacqueline Hesson
6. N. Harris

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Tayana Panova
2. Xavier Carbonell

Citations in the corpus

• Psychological Distress, Emotion Dysregulation, and Coping Behaviour: a Theoretical Perspective of Problematic Smartphone Use (2020, background): “2019; Samaha and Hawi 2016), there is a longstanding and ongoing debate surrounding what should and should not constitute behavioural addiction (Griffiths 2017; Kardefelt-Winther 2017; Kardefelt-Winther et al. 2017; Petry et al. 2018; Sussman et al. 2017).”
• Is smartphone addiction really an addiction? (2018, methodology): “The number of hours employed on the phone is used as criteria without considering that smartphone use is a normalized part of everyday life in many societies today even when engaged with very frequently (Kardefelt-Winther et al., 2017); therefore, increase in use should not be a valid criterion.”