BackgroundBehavioral addiction research has been particularly flourishing over the last two decades. However, recent publications have suggested that nearly all daily life activities might lead to a genuine addiction.Methods and aimIn this article, we discuss how the use of atheoretical and confirmatory research approaches may result in the identification of an unlimited list of “new” behavioral addictions.ResultsBoth methodological and theoretical shortcomings of these studies were discussed.ConclusionsWe suggested that studies overpathologizing daily life activities are likely to prompt a dismissive appraisal of behavioral addiction research. Consequently, we proposed several roadmaps for future research in the field, centrally highlighting the need for longer tenable behavioral addiction research that shifts from a mere criteria-based approach toward an approach focusing on the psychological processes involved.

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.

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Background: The network approach to mental disorders offers a novel framework for conceptualizing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a causal system of interacting symptoms. Objective: In this study, we extended this work by estimating the structure of relations among PTSD symptoms in adults reporting personal histories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA; N = 179).   Method: We employed two complementary methods. First, using the graphical LASSO, we computed a sparse, regularized partial correlation network revealing associations (edges) between pairs of PTSD symptoms (nodes). Next, using a Bayesian approach, we computed a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to estimate a directed, potentially causal model of the relations among symptoms. Results: For the first network, we found that physiological reactivity to reminders of trauma, dreams about the trauma, and lost of interest in previously enjoyed activities were highly central nodes. However, stability analyses suggest that these findings were unstable across subsets of our sample. The DAG suggests that becoming physiologically reactive and upset in response to reminders of the trauma may be key drivers of other symptoms in adult survivors of CSA. Conclusions: Our study illustrates the strengths and limitations of these network analytic approaches to PTSD.

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Emotional intelligence (EI) can be defined as the ability to identify, express, understand, manage, and use emotions. EI has been shown to have an important impact on health, relationships, and work/academic performance. In this article, we present a systematic review of 46 EI intervention studies on adult populations in order to assess their outcomes. Overall, these findings provide some support for the efficacy of EI programs. However, important limitations in most of the studies restrict the generalizability of their results. We discuss the contributions and limitations of these studies and make recommendations for the development and implementation of future interventions.

Social Phobics exhibit an attentional bias for threat in probe detection and probe discrimination paradigms. Attention training programs, whereby probes always replace nonthreat cues, reduce attentional bias for threat and self-reported anxiety. However, it remains unclear whether the therapeutic benefits of attention training result from people learning to disengage attention from threat cues or acquiring greater control over their attention by learning to deploy it flexibly. Moreover, researchers have seldom taken behavioral measures, and have never taken physiological measures of fear reduction.Investigating these questions, we found that training to disengage attention from threat is more effective than training to deploy it flexibly in social phobia. Indeed, the former condition reduced self-report, behavioral and physiological measures of anxiety.