With the global expansion of the COVID-19 pandemic, social or physical distancing, quarantines, and lockdowns have become more prevalent. Concurrently, Pornhub, one of the largest pornography sites, has reported increased pornography use in multiple countries, with global traffic increasing over 11% from late February to March 17, 2020. While some substantial increases have coincided with Pornhub making its premium services free to countries in lockdowned or quarantined jurisdictions, countries without such free premium access have also reported increases in the range of 4–24%. In addition, pornography searches using the terms “coronavirus”, “corona”, and “covid” have reached more than 9.1 million. In this letter, we discuss COVID-19-related pornography-use patterns and the impact they may have with respect to problematic pornography use.
Aims: Due to the increasing evidence of shared vulnerabilities between addictive behaviors and excessive food intake, the concept of food addiction in specific clinical populations has become a topic of scientific interest. The aim of this study was to validate the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) 2.0 in a Spanish sample. We also sought to explore food addiction and its clinical correlates in eating disorder (ED) and gambling disorder (GD) patients.Methods: The sample included 301 clinical cases (135 ED and 166 GD), diagnosed according to DSM-5 criteria, and 152 healthy controls (HC) recruited from the general population.Results: Food addiction was more prevalent in patients with ED, than in patients with GD and HC (77.8, 7.8, and 3.3%, respectively). Food addiction severity was associated with higher BMI, psychopathology and specific personality traits, such as higher harm avoidance, and lower self-directedness. The psychometrical properties of the Spanish version of the YFAS 2.0 were excellent with good convergent validity. Moreover, it obtained good accuracy in discriminating between diagnostic subtypes.Conclusions: Our results provide empirical support for the use of the Spanish YFAS 2.0 as a reliable and valid tool to assess food addiction among several clinical populations (namely ED and GD). The prevalence of food addiction is heterogeneous between disorders. Common risk factors such as high levels of psychopathology and low self-directedness appear to be present in individuals with food addiction.
Confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have a serious and complex impact on the mental health of patients with an eating disorder (ED) and of patients with obesity. The present manuscript has the following aims: (1) to analyse the psychometric properties of the COVID Isolation Eating Scale (CIES), (2) to explore changes that occurred due to confinement in eating symptomatology; and (3) to explore the general acceptation of the use of telemedicine during confinement. The sample comprised 121 participants (87 ED patients and 34 patients with obesity) recruited from six different centres. Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) tested the rational-theoretical structure of the 872 FERN ANDEZ-ARANDA ET AL.
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