The Neural Mechanism Of Attention Processing In Internet Pornography Addiction

Research background and purpose:In the past 20 years,a large number of Internet pornographic materials have led to excessive use by some groups and they even developed cybersex addiction.However,whether the excessive use of Internet pornography can be defined as a behavioral addiction is still controversial,and it is not clear what aspects of its external behavioral manifestations and cognitive neural mechanisms are different from substance dependence or other behavioral addictions(such as gaming addiction,gambling addiction,etc.).In many addiction models,cueing response is the core feature of the formation and development of addictive behaviors,while attentional bias is an important part of cueing response,and there is a more complex cognitive process which is automatic evaluation and filtering of stimuli before conscious attention is focused.Therefore,from the level of consciousness and pre-consciousness,this study conducted in-depth and systematic research on the attention processing process of cybersex addiction,and further understood attention processing mechanism and explored the similarity with substance and other addictive behaviors,so as to provide more powerful electrophysiological evidence for the definition,clinical diagnosis and treatment of this abnormal behavior.Materials and Methods:The research includes two parts.In study1,to explore the attentional bias towards pornographic information from the conscious and unconscious levels,twenty-eight individuals with high Tendencies towards Cybersex Addiction(TCA)and 29 with low TCA performed an addiction Stroop task comprising sexual and neutral images in colored frames.Participants were asked to respond to the frame color and not the image contents,and behavioral and event-related potentials were recorded.After proving the existence of early attention processing,study 2 adopted the reversed deviant-standard oddball paradigm to further verify the automatic detection of the unconscious level of attention processing by TCA individuals through MMN EEG components.In both parts,preliminary experiment was conducted first,and then formal behavioral and ERP experiments were conducted.Finally,behavioral and ERP data were integrated and analyzed,so as to deduce the neural mechanism of TCA individuals’ attention processing to pornographic information.Result:In study1Behaviorally,an addiction Stroop interference effect was found in the high TCA group,as shown by the longer reaction times to judge the frame colors of sexual images.Electrophysiologically,a P200(150–220ms)enhancement was present in response to sexual images compared with neutral ones,which was absent in the low TCA group.The event-related potential correlates with the addiction Stroop interference effect,indicating that the attentional bias underlying the addiction Stroop interference operates at an automatic level.A general,sexually related bias was found in the late positive potential(300–700ms)amplitude,although between-group differences were insignificant.In study2The data from the reversed deviant-standard oddball paradigm showed that the individuals with high TCA showed abnormal pre-attention processing to pornographic stimuli in the automatic information evaluation stage.The MMN amplitude of the individuals with high TCA was not significant under the condition of pornographic stimuli,while the individuals with low TCA had obvious MMN components under the condition of pornographic stimuli.