Pinning Our Possessions: Associations between Digital Hoarding and Symptoms of Hoarding Disorder

Publication date: Available online 26 December 2018Source: Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related DisordersAuthor(s): Alexandria M. Luxon, C. Elizabeth Hamilton, Sage Bates, Gregory S. ChassonAbstractDigital hoarding may relate to characteristics of physical Hoarding Disorder (HD), but this has only been systematically investigated once before. To that end, a non-clinical sample of 101 Pinterest users completed measures of emotional state before and after an experimental manipulation involving deception in which they were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: being led to believe that one digital item or a group of digital items, selected at random, would be deleted from their Pinterest account. Participants completed measures of electronic object attachment, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and HD. Results indicated a significant positive correlation between number of digital items and level of electronic object attachment. Higher levels of physical acquiring behaviors were significantly related to increased distress. Electronic object attachment mediated the relationship between hoarding severity and level of distress when asked to discard electronic possessions. Results support previous findings of a relationship between digital and physical hoarding, as well as research linking increased negative emotionality from an imaginal discarding exercise with HD severity. Future research needs to examine the relationship between physical and digital hoarding, the degree t...
Source: Journal of Obsessive Compulsive and Related Disorders - Category: Psychiatry Source Type: research