Spirituality Fails to Predict Problematic Pornography Use in New Study

Problematic pornography use has become one of the most debated topics in behavioral health, yet researchers still struggle to agree on what actually causes it. A new study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior by Esme Fiennes and Halley M. Pontes of Birkbeck, University of London, adds a striking twist to that debate: the moral weight people carry about pornography may matter far more than whether they consider themselves spiritual. The study, a brief report based on an online survey of 121 adults from the general population, set out to map the behavioral, psychological, and moral characteristics of problematic pornography use and to test, for the first time in this context, whether spirituality functions as a value system that shapes it.

The starting point for the research is a long-standing diagnostic dilemma. Clinicians and researchers have found that people who describe their pornography use as problematic often fall into two very different groups. Some show genuine behavioral dysregulation, meaning they use pornography compulsively, lose control over the habit, and continue despite real harm to work, relationships, or well-being. Others experience distress not because their consumption is out of control, but because their use conflicts with deeply held moral or religious convictions, a phenomenon researchers call moral incongruence. Distinguishing between these two pathways is critical, because treating a moral conflict as an addiction, or an addiction as mere guilt, can send people down the wrong therapeutic path.

Decades of research have established that religiosity is a powerful driver of this second pathway. People with strong religious commitments are more likely to morally disapprove of pornography, more likely to perceive themselves as addicted even at moderate levels of use, and more likely to experience religious and spiritual struggles when they consume it. But religion and spirituality are not the same construct. Religion typically involves organized doctrine, communal practice, and explicit behavioral rules, while spirituality refers to a broader, often individual sense of meaning, connection, and transcendence. Whether that broader spiritual orientation also fuels pornography-related distress had never been systematically tested, and that gap is what Fiennes and Pontes set out to fill.

The researchers recruited 121 participants from the general population, with a mean age of 27.3 years and a standard deviation of 5.05, and a slight male majority of 53.7 percent. Each participant completed an online survey measuring problematic pornography use, patterns of pornography consumption, psychological health and well-being, moral disapproval of pornography, and spirituality. The battery also captured emotion regulation strategies, including expressive suppression, the tendency to inhibit the outward expression of emotions, a factor that prior work on compulsive sexual behavior has repeatedly linked to dysregulated use. By measuring all of these dimensions simultaneously, the team could examine which factors independently predicted problematic pornography use when the others were held constant.

The results, analyzed through multiple regression, painted a clear and somewhat surprising picture. Four variables significantly predicted problematic pornography use: male gender, weekly pornography use, psychological distress, and expressive suppression as an emotion regulation strategy. Together, these factors explained 38.2 percent of the variability in problematic use scores, a substantial proportion for research in this field. Each predictor aligns with a distinct strand of theory. Male gender reflects consistent epidemiological findings that men report higher rates of both use and problematic use. Weekly use captures the behavioral frequency component, since regular exposure creates more opportunities for dysregulated engagement. Psychological distress echoes a growing longitudinal literature linking emotional suffering with compulsive sexual behavior, possibly reflecting self-medication cycles in which negative affect drives use and use deepens distress.

The role of expressive suppression is particularly interesting from a technical standpoint. Emotion regulation research distinguishes between strategies like cognitive reappraisal, which reinterprets emotional situations, and suppression, which clamps down on emotional expression without changing the underlying feeling. Suppression is metabolically and cognitively costly, tends to amplify physiological arousal, and is associated with poorer mental health outcomes. In the context of pornography, individuals who habitually suppress their emotions may be more likely to use sexual material as an escape valve for feelings they cannot otherwise process, and less likely to seek help or articulate their struggles, allowing the pattern to escalate unchecked. This finding situates problematic pornography use squarely within the broader framework of emotion dysregulation that underpins contemporary models of addictive behaviors, such as the interaction of person-affect-cognition-execution model, which frames addictive behaviors as maladaptive coping arising from the interplay of personal predispositions, affective states, and cognitive control deficits.

The most consequential result, however, was what did not predict problematic use. Spirituality showed no significant relationship with problematic pornography use, and neither did self-esteem nor age. This null finding is theoretically loaded. If spirituality behaved like religiosity, it should have been associated with greater moral disapproval and, through moral incongruence, with higher perceived addiction and distress. Its absence suggests that spiritual values, unlike religious doctrines, are not inherently incongruent with pornography use. In other words, a person can hold a rich sense of meaning, connection, and transcendence without importing a moral prohibition against sexual media, whereas religious frameworks often encode explicit rules that turn use into transgression.

The authors interpret this as initial evidence for an important distinction between spiritual and religious value systems in shaping pornography-related experiences. The distinction has practical implications. Screening tools and clinical interviews that lump spirituality and religiosity together may misclassify patients, attributing distress to a general value system when the real driver is doctrine-specific moral conflict. Conversely, interventions that draw on spiritual resources, which have shown benefits in substance use treatment and mental health contexts, may not carry the same moral baggage when applied to pornography-related concerns. A clinician working with a spiritually oriented but non-religious client might therefore focus on emotion regulation skills and behavioral control rather than on resolving value conflicts that may not exist.

Several limitations temper these conclusions. The sample of 121 general-population participants is modest, and brief reports by design offer a snapshot rather than a deep exploration. The cross-sectional design cannot establish causality: psychological distress may drive problematic use, or problematic use may generate distress, or both may feed each other in a loop that only longitudinal data can untangle. Self-report measures of sensitive behaviors are vulnerable to shame-driven underreporting, and the null finding for spirituality could reflect measurement choices, since spirituality is notoriously difficult to operationalize and different instruments capture different facets. Age and self-esteem null results should likewise be read within the restricted age range of a young adult sample rather than as universal truths.

Even with those caveats, the study makes a meaningful contribution to a field in the midst of conceptual housekeeping. The inclusion of compulsive sexual behavior disorder in the ICD-11 has intensified efforts to separate genuine dysregulation from moral incongruence, and large international projects have begun mapping pornography-use profiles across dozens of countries. This brief report adds a new axis to that mapping effort, suggesting that the moral landscape of pornography use is carved by religious doctrine rather than by spirituality in general. As the authors conclude, a complex interplay of behavioral, psychological, and moral characteristics informs experiences of problematic pornography use, but spiritual values appear to stand apart from that interplay, a finding that could reshape how researchers measure, and clinicians treat, pornography-related distress in an increasingly secular yet still spiritually curious world.

Subject of Research: Psychosocial, moral, and spiritual predictors of problematic pornography use

Article Title: Investigating the Role of Psychosocial and Values-Based Factors in Problematic Pornography Use

Article References: Fiennes, E., & Pontes, H. M. (2026). Investigating the Role of Psychosocial and Values-Based Factors in Problematic Pornography Use. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03546-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03546-7

Keywords: problematic pornography use, moral incongruence, spirituality, religiosity, emotion regulation, psychological distress, behavioral addiction, compulsive sexual behavior, self-esteem, Archives of Sexual Behavior, Investigating, Role