Many people experience struggle around religious and spiritual aspects of life, as shown in a steadily growing body of research. A need now exists for more comprehensive, reliable, concise measurement of religious and spiritual (r/s) struggles through a scale that covers multiple domains. This article describes the development and initial validation of a 26-item measure, the Religious and Spiritual Struggles (RSS) Scale. The measure assesses six domains of r/s struggle: divine (negative emotion centered on beliefs about God or a perceived relationship with God), demonic (concern that the devil or evil spirits are attacking an individual or causing negative events), interpersonal (concern about negative experiences with religious people or institutions; interpersonal conflict around religious issues), moral (wrestling with attempts to follow moral principles; worry or guilt about perceived offenses by the self), doubt (feeling troubled by doubts or questions about one's r/s beliefs), and ultimate meaning (concern about not perceiving deep meaning in one's life). Study 1 used factor analytic techniques in two adult samples (Ns ϭ 400 and 483) to refine the item pool for the RSS. Study 2, which sampled 1141 undergraduates, showed very good fit for a six-factor model using confirmatory factor analysis. Study 2 also provided evidence of convergent, discriminant and predictive validity by relating RSS scores to measures of religiousness, r/s struggle and mental health. Several potentially important demographic differences emerged on the RSS. For example, undergraduates without committed romantic relationships and those who self-identified as homosexual reported greater r/s struggles across multiple domains.

The notion of problematic pornography use remains contentious in both academic and popular literature. Although the mental health community at large is divided as to the addictive versus non-addictive nature of Internet pornography, substantial numbers of individuals report "feeling" as if their use of Internet pornography is problematic. The present work seeks to construct a model related to problematic pornography use that is clearly derived from empirical literature and that provides directions to be tested in future research. The focus of the present work is on those perceptions as they relate to the overarching experience of moral incongruence in pornography use, which is generally thought of as the experience of having one's behaviors be inconsistent with one's beliefs. To this end, we put forth a model of pornography problems due to moral incongruence. Within this model, we describe how pornography-related problems-particularly feelings of addiction to pornography-may be, in many cases, better construed as functions of discrepancies-moral incongruence-between pornography-related beliefs and pornography-related behaviors. A systematic review of literature and meta-analysis is conducted in order to evaluate support for this model, and the implications of this model for research and clinical practice are discussed.

In 1998, Gold and Heffner authored a landmark review in Clinical Psychology Review on the topic of sexual addiction that concluded that sexual addiction, though increasingly popular in mental health settings, was largely based on speculation, with virtually no empirical basis. In the more than two decades since that review, empirical research around compulsive sexual behaviors (which subsumes prior research about sexual addiction) has flourished, ultimately culminating in the inclusion of a novel diagnosis of Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder in the eleventh edition of the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases. The present work details a systematic review of empirical research published between January 1 st , 1995 and August 1 st , 2020 related to compulsive sexual behaviors, with a specific focus on evaluating the methodologies of that literature. This review yielded 371 papers detailing 415 individual studies. In general, the present review finds that, although research related to compulsive sexual behaviors has proliferated, much of this work is characterized by simplistic methodological designs, a lack of theoretical integration, and an absence of quality measurement. Moreover, the present review finds a virtual absence of high-quality treatment-related research published within this time frame. Implications of these findings for both clinical practice and future research are discussed.

Background and aims Despite controversies regarding its existence as a legitimate mental health condition, self-reports of pornography addiction seem to occur regularly. In the United States, prior works using various sampling techniques, such as undergraduate samples and online convenience samples, have consistently demonstrated that some pornography users report feeling dysregulated or out of control in their use. Even so, there has been very little work in US nationally representative samples to examine self-reported pornography addiction. Methods This study sought to examine self-reported pornography addiction in a US nationally representative sample of adult Internet users (N = 2,075). Results The results indicated that most participants had viewed pornography within their lifetimes (n = 1,461), with just over half reporting some use in the past year (n = 1,056). Moreover, roughly 11% of men and 3% of women reported some agreement with the statement “I am addicted to pornography.” Across all participants, such feelings were most strongly associated with male gender, younger age, greater religiousness, greater moral incongruence regarding pornography use, and greater use of pornography. Discussion and conclusion Collectively, these findings are consistent with prior works that have noted that self-reported pornography addiction is a complex phenomenon that is predicted by both objective behavior and subjective moral evaluations of that behavior.

The authors aimed to validate a brief measure of perceived addiction to Internet pornography refined from the 32-item Cyber Pornography Use Inventory, report its psychometric properties, and examine how the notion of perceived addiction to Internet pornography might be related to other domains of psychological functioning. To accomplish this, 3 studies were conducted using a sample of undergraduate psychology students, a web-based adult sample, and a sample of college students seeking counseling at a university's counseling center. The authors developed and refined a short 9-item measure of perceived addiction to Internet pornography, confirmed its structure in multiple samples, examined its relatedness to hypersexuality more broadly, and demonstrated that the notion of perceived addiction to Internet pornography is very robustly related to various measures of psychological distress. Furthermore, the relation between psychological distress and the new measure persisted, even when other potential contributors (e.g., neuroticism, self-control, amount of time spent viewing pornography) were controlled for statistically, indicating the clinical relevance of assessing perceived addiction to Internet pornography.