Comment by superkuh

Comment by superkuh a day ago

23 replies

>Behavioural addictions, characterised by compulsive engagement in rewarding activities despite adverse consequences in the long term, are more heterogeneous and less well-understood than substance addictions

Indeed. Mostly because every study on "behavioral addictions" is published in third tier journals or is a negative result in real journals. It's something that doesn't actually exist in mammals and it's current popularity is mostly from profit seeking scams for rehabilitation "clinics" preying on the 'screens are addictive' meme burning through current parent populations.

And despite the headlines suggesting otherwise, and the press likely running with those false headlines, *the actual study itself does not find any addictive behavior*. A null result.

>Despite the observed parallels between high-AB dogs and humans affected by behavioural addictions, we refrain from conclusively characterising high-AB dogs as exhibiting addictive behaviour, given the absence of established benchmarks or standardised criteria. It is important to be cautious when pathologising behaviour, especially given that even in humans, addictive behaviours are still difficult to define and measure.

croemer a day ago

> I'm shocked to see an informal survey based study (which will just confirm the owners pre-existing biases and opinions) being published in Nature of all things.

It's not "Nature", it's "Scientific Reports" with impact factor of only 3.8 vs 48 of "Nature".

Sure the publisher is "Springer Nature", and the domain is "nature.com" but that doesn't make the journal "Nature".

  • quotemstr a day ago

    You're right. That's it. I'm going to make a browser extension that'll examine any paper I'm reading and color the address bar according to the impact factor of the journal in which it appears and the h-indexes of the authors.

    • cheshire_cat a day ago

      Sounds useful, please share it here if you end up implementing it!

qnleigh a day ago

> given the absence of established benchmarks or standardised criteria

The quote you cite doesn't support your claim. If there is no established criteria, then no amount of evidence will establish the link. But absent a rigorous definition, they are still giving evidence for a qualitative similarity between human addiction and the observed animal behavior. That's not a null result.

unkulunkulu a day ago

can you provide more context for this claim? my intuition and experience tells me the opposite.

what is the definition here? are impulsive avoidance copings like playing a video game instead of doing the hard work of addressing the worries/planned hard activities not a “video game addiction”?

and if we are talking physical withdrawal, then how should we call the same aspect of nicotine/alcohol addiction mechanics?

dvfjsdhgfv a day ago

Well, my fellow CBT practitioners would disagree.

There are things you don't do but you understand not doing them is hurting you, so you decide to follow CBT (for example - there are other ways, but CBT has decent efficiency although it's expensive). They don't really need to be classified disorders or fobias.

Similarly, there are things you do and you realize not doing them would be beneficial to you. So you try to stop them and you realize it's hard. Again, you can use CBT or another method (or even medication in some cases). Whether you classify these things as "behavioral addictions" or use another term is secondary, the phenomenon itself is very real and I find it baffling anyone would dispute that.

  • vintermann 11 hours ago

    Rational choice theory has problems explaining "weak will", why we do things we don't want, or don't do things we want.

    What's self-evident to you (and me) to some people gets in the way of a neat description of society.

stirfish a day ago

>It's something that doesn't actually exist in mammals and it's current popularity is mostly from profit seeking scams for rehabilitation "clinics" preying on the 'screens are addictive' meme burning through current parent populations.

What about gambling, eating, or shopping?

  • superkuh a day ago

    Gambling is not an addiction. It is "gambling disorder" and it was grandfathered into the DSM. It is explicitly not an addiction medically. Eating and shopping are two great examples not erronously grandfathered in, which committees repeated find are not addiction, but which those scammers love to profit off of.

    • Eric_WVGG a day ago

      My understanding was that self-professed gambling addicts — unlike casual gambers — were discovered to get the same shot of dopamine to their system when losing as the do when winning. Why would that not qualify as “medically addicted”? (IANA-Doctor)

    • Pulcinella a day ago

      So why do you think people continue to gamble, even after it has ruined their and their families lives and finances? Slot machine addicts will literally void their bladder rather than stop playing for 5 minutes to use the restroom.

      • quotemstr a day ago

        Because people make poor choices and it's usually their own fault.

        We used have words like "vice" and "sin" to describe these poor choices, but thanks to post-60s radical individualism, the only vocabulary for describing maladaptive behavior that remains of the language of medicine. Therefore, everything bad someone does is a "disease" for which he needs "therapy" or "treatment". We've utterly lost the capacity for describing deficiencies of the conscience.

    • hippo22 a day ago

      "Gambling Disorder" is in the disorder class "Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders" in DSM-5 though.

      • SoftTalker a day ago

        Many behaviors have been added and removed as "disorders" from the DSM as politics of the time demanded.

    • KittenInABox a day ago

      If this is true, why do GLP-1 drugs which are just hormones also shown to have an effect on gambling?