Behaviours that are performed compulsively and repetitively and are associated with certain negative consequences have been a conceptual challenge for psychopathology. They are usually labelled as behavioural addictions, although this term has been vague, misused and applied to an exceptionally wide variety of activities (Starcevic, 2016). A similar trend to medicalise problematic behaviours has appeared more recently, with an emergence of ‘selfitis’ (Balakrishnan and Griffiths, in press). This article draws attention to these troublesome tendencies and aims to shed more light on their origin and implications.
exhaustive understanding of the deficits associated with binge drinking, as well as of the possible transition
towards alcohol-dependence.
Methods: 46 young adults (23 binge drinkers, 12 women; 23 control participants, 12 women) were recruited
among university students. They performed an emotional recognition task consisting of the visual decoding of
six basic emotions (i.e. anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness). Accuracy scores and detection
thresholds were collected for each emotion.
Results: Binge drinkers showed lower performance than control participants for the decoding of all emotions and
increased detection threshold, this later reflecting less ability to capture an emotion. Binge drinking is thus
associated with a need for higher emotional intensity to perform correct detection. Moreover, these emotional
difficulties appear specifically related to alcohol consumption.
Conclusion: These findings reinforce previous experimental evidence of altered emotional processing among
binge drinkers, and extend these results for various emotional contents. They support the hypothesis of a
continuum between binge drinking and alcohol-dependence, in which massive emotional impairments have
been documented. Indeed, these impairments could be involved in the onset and maintenance of excessive
alcohol consumption, notably through the established relationship between emotional deficits and social distress.