‘Fanorexia’ and ‘ballimia’: Football fanaticism, brand loyalty, and addiction

As the 2018 World Cup kicks in, it’s an opportune time to ask why are we so loyal to our national and club football teams? Whatever the results, we tend to support them week in week out, all year round. They can cause us misery and heartache and yet still we support them. As a Sunderland fan, I know this only too well. In the season just ended I went from agony to even more agony as I saw Sunderland get relegated for the second season in a row.

Could it be that following our clubs is an addiction? It has been argued by academics working in the marketing field that commercial organisations would love to have the kind of brand loyalty shown by football fans – something that Ken Parker and Trish Stuart argued in their award winning paper ‘The ‘West Ham Syndrome’ published in the Journal of the Market Research Society (I’m not making this up, honest!).

Parker and Stuart, working at the time of the study for the company Discovery Research, surveyed 2000 adults and also carried out some focus group interviews with football fans (including some ardent West Ham United supporters). They found that 58% of males had made a commitment to club their team by the age of 11 years. (I just happen to be one of those men having supported Sunderland from the age of 7 years of age after watching them beat Leeds in the 1973 FA Cup Final). More than half of children whose parents supported a team went on to support the same one, while a third of all fans still followed their local team.

Marketeers would love to be able to take the seemingly unstinted loyalty of football fans and somehow transfer that loyalty to the products they are trying to sell. For instance, the brand of coffee we buy tends to be governed by many factors such as television advertising, the taste, the price, the packaging, etc. If we come across coffee that (for whatever reason) is better (cheaper, tastes better, etc.), we automatically switch our ‘allegiance’ to another brand of coffee. Parker and Stuart argued that wherever West Ham finish in the league, Hammers fans would not desert their club and/or switch to another club. So what’s the difference between football clubs as a brand and other commercial products as a brand? Maybe it’s passion and the fact that football can be such an emotional experience for the diehard fan.

Some working in the advertising industry claim many people working in marketing lack passion in their product. Apparently there are other products (such as cars) that consumers get very passionate about and this means that they repeatedly buy a particular make of car despite any acknowledged faults. However, one huge fault can damage a brand’s reputation almost overnight, as Toyota is only too aware. The good news for Toyota is that one of the most interesting things about research on the ‘West Ham Syndrome’ is that it can help to explain why leading brands are able to bounce back from PR disasters in similar ways to football clubs come back from being relegated to a lower division.

However, are football fans really as loyal as most of us assume? A paper by Alan Tapp examined the loyalty of football fans (in the Journal of Database Marketing and Customer Strategy Management) and wondered what it is about football clubs as a brand that makes them so successful – especially as the ‘product’ is so inconsistent and unpredictable? (‘Inconsistent’ and ‘unpredictable are certainly words I would associate with the England team and the England players!). Parker and Stuart claimed that levels of loyalty were “only marginally affected” by West Ham’s fortunes. However, Tapp says this is completely untrue. He cites analysis of football attendance figures since 1945 to show that crowd sizes are related to a team’s position in the league, and that teams lose support when they are doing poorly. Despite the fact that crowd attendance is linked to how well a football club is doing, it’s still probably true to say that football fans are still more loyal to their club than they are to most other products. All this goes to show is that most of us will continue to love England, warts and all.

Just before the 1998 World Cup, I began to carry out some research into football fanaticism and whether football fanatics could be considered ‘addicted’ to following their football team. This is easier said than done as it all depends upon how addiction is defined, and if ‘football fan addiction’ exists, what are people actually addicted to? I define addiction as any behaviour that features what I believe to be the six core components of addiction (i.e., salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, conflict and relapse). Throughout my career, I have consistently argued that any behaviour that fulfils these six criteria should be considered as a genuine addiction. If you were addicted to following your football team, this is what I would expect:

Salience – This occurs when following your football team (and doing things related to your football team) becomes the most important activity in your life and dominates your thinking (total preoccupation), feelings (cravings) and behaviour (deterioration of socialized behaviour). For instance, even if you are not actually engaged in something football-related, you will be thinking about the next time that you are.

 Mood modification – This is the subjective experience that you would feel as a consequence of following your football team (i.e. you experience an arousing ‘buzz’ or a ‘high’ – or the exact opposite – a tranquilizing feeling of ‘escape’ or ‘numbing’ when following your team).

Tolerance – This is the process whereby increasing amounts of activity related to your football team are needed to get mood modifying effects. This basically means that if you were engaged in activities related to following your football team, you would gradually build up the amount of the time you spend engaged in those activities.

Withdrawal symptoms – These are the unpleasant feeling states and/or physical effects (e.g., the shakes, moodiness, irritability etc.) that occur when you are prevented from following your football team or stopped from engaging in football-related activities.

Conflict – This refers to the conflicts between following your football team and those around you (interpersonal conflict), conflicts with other activities (your job, schoolwork, social life, hobbies and interests) or from within yourself (knowing you are doing too much of the activity and/or subjective feelings of loss of control) which are concerned with spending too much time following your football team.

 Relapse – This is the tendency to revert back to earlier patterns of behaviour (following your football team and engaging in football-related activity) after a period of abstinence.

Using these criteria, I have come across very few genuine examples of someone addicted to a football team. The most extreme case I have come across was one woman who left her husband because of his ‘addiction’ to Chelsea football club. She told me that their bedroom was a shrine to Chelsea, he watched almost every Chelsea game home and away (including European away matches), spent all their joint savings and ran up huge debts following Chelsea, and eventually got sacked from his job because he kept ringing in sick whenever Chelsea were playing hundreds of miles from home during midweek games. Out of season he would be constantly depressed and would try to alleviate his mood by endlessly watching videos of Chelsea’s greatest games. Once the football season started, his depression would lift. I never met this individual but he appears to have fulfilled my criteria for addiction.

For most people, enthusiastically following your team – even to excess – is unlikely to be an addiction. The main difference between a healthy excessive enthusiasm and an addiction is that healthy enthusiasms add to life and addictions take away from it.

(Please note that a version of this article was originally published in The Conversation)

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Griffiths, M.D. (1996). Behavioural addictions: An issue for everybody? Journal of Workplace Learning, 8(3), 19-25.

Griffiths, M.D.  (2005). A ‘components’ model of addiction within a biopsychosocial framework. Journal of Substance Use, 10, 191-197.

Griffiths, M.D. (2017). Behavioural addiction and substance addiction should be defined by their similarities not their dissimilarities. Addiction, 112, 1718-1720.

Parker, K., Stuart, T. 1997. The West Ham syndrome. Journal of the Market Research Society, 39(3), 509-517.

Tapp, A. (2004). The loyalty of football fans – We’ll support you evermore? Journal of Database Marketing and Customer Strategy Management, 11, 203-215.

Me, myself-itis: A brief overview of obsessive selfie-taking

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a selfie is a “photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media”. From a psychological perspective, the taking of selfies is a self-oriented action that allows users to establish their individuality and self-importance; it is also associated with personality traits such as narcissism.

However, selfie-taking is more than just the taking of a photograph. It can include the editing of the color and contrast, the changing of backgrounds, and the addition of other effects before uploading. These added options and the use of integrative editing have further popularized selfie-taking behavior, particularly amongst teenagers and young adults.

On March 31, 2014, a story appeared on a website called the Adobo Chronicles that claimed that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) had classed “selfitis” as a new mental disorder. According to the author, the organization had defined selfitis as “the obsessive compulsive desire to take photos of one’s self and post them on social media as a way to make up for the lack of self-esteem and to fill a gap in intimacy”. The same article also claimed there three levels of the disorder: borderline (“taking photos of one’s self at least three times a day but not posting them on social media”), acute (“taking photos of one’s self at least three times a day and posting each of the photos on social media”), and chronic (“uncontrollable urge to take photos of one’s self round the clock and posting the photos on social media more than six times a day”).

The story was republished on numerous news sites around the world, but it soon became clear the story was a hoax. However, one of the reasons that so many news outlets republished the story – other than that it seemingly fit certain preexisting stereotypes in people’s minds – was that the criteria used to delineate the three levels of selfitis (i.e., borderline, acute, and chronic) seemed believable.

Therefore, we thought it would be interesting to examine whether there was any substance to the claims that taking selfies can be a time-consuming and potentially obsessive behavior – the stereotype underlying many people’s credulity about the fake story. We empirically explored the concept of selfitis across two studies and collected data on the existence of selfitis with respect to the three alleged levels (borderline, acute, and chronic), ultimately developed our own psychometric scale to assess the sub-components of selfitis (the Selfitis Behaviour Scale).

We used Indian students as participants in our research because India has the largest total number of users on Facebook by country. We also knew India accounts for more selfie-related deaths in the world compared to any other country. with a reported 76 deaths reported out of a total of 127 worldwide since 2014. (Those deaths usually occur when people attempt to take selfies in dangerous contexts, such as in water, from heights, in the proximity of moving vehicles, like trains, or while posing with weapons).

Our study began by using focus group interviews with 225 young adults with an average age of 21 years old to gather an initial set of criteria that underlie selfitis. Example questions used during the focus group interviews included ‘What compels you to take selfies?’, ‘Do you feel addicted to taking selfies?’ and ‘Do you think that someone can become addicted to taking selfies?’ It was during these interviews that participants confirmed there appeared to be individuals who obsessively take selfies — or, in other words, that selfitis does at least exist. But, since we did not collect any data on the negative psychosocial impacts, we cannot yet claim that the behavior is a mental disorder; negative consequences of the behavior is a key part of that determination.

The six components of selfitis, tested on the further participants, were: environmental enhancement (e.g., taking selfies in specific locations to feel good and show off to others); social competition (e.g., taking selfies to get more ‘likes’ on social media); attention-seeking (e.g., taking selfies to gain attention from others); mood modification (e.g., taking selfies to feel better); self-confidence (e.g., taking selfies to feel more positive about oneself); and subjective conformity (e.g., taking selfies to fit in with one’s social group and peers).

Our findings showed that those with chronic selfitis were more likely to be motivated to take selfies due to attention-seeking, environmental enhancement and social competition. The results suggest that people with chronic levels of selfitis are seeking to fit in with those around them, and may display symptoms similar to other potentially addictive behaviours. Other studies have also suggested that a minority of individuals might have a ‘selfie addiction’ (see ‘References and further reading’ below).

With the existence of the condition apparently confirmed, we hope that further research will be carried out to understand more about how and why people develop this potentially obsessive behaviour, and what can be done to help people who are the most affected. However, the findings of our research do not indicate that selfitis is a mental disorder based on the findings of this study – a claim made in many of the news reports about our study, possibly demonstrating how deep the stereotypes about selfie-takes run – only that selfitis appears to be a condition that requires further research to fully assess the psychosocial impacts that the behaviour might have on the individual.

If you are interested in assessing your own behavior, click here to download where you can complete the self-assessment test in the Appendix of our paper.

Please note: This article was co-written with Dr. Janarthanan Balakrishnan (Thiagarajar School of Management, India)

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Balakrishnan, J. & Griffiths, M.D. (2018). An exploratory study of ‘selfitis’ and the development of the Selfitis Behavior Scale. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-017-9844-x.

Gaddala, A., Hari Kumar, K. J., & Pusphalatha, C. (2017). A study on various effects of internet and selfie dependence among undergraduate medical students. Journal of Contemporary Medicine and Dentistry, 5(2), 29-32.

Griffiths, M.D. & Balakrishnan, J. (2018). The psychosocial impact of excessive selfie-taking in youth: A brief overview. Education and Health, 36(1), 3-5.

Kaur, S., & Vig, D. (2016). Selfie and mental health issues: An overview. Indian Journal of Health and Wellbeing, 7(12), 1149

Khan, N., Saraswat, R., & Amin, B. (2017). Selfie: Enjoyment or addiction? Journal of Medical Science and Clinical Research, 5, 15836-15840.

Lee, R. L. (2016). Diagnosing the selfie: Pathology or parody? Networking the spectacle in late capitalism. Third Text, 30(3-4), 264-27

Senft, T. M., & Baym, N. K. (2015). Selfies introduction – What does the selfie say? Investigating a global phenomenon. International Journal of Communication, 9, 19

Singh, D., & Lippmann, S. (2017). Selfie addiction. Internet and Psychiatry, April 2. Located at: https://www.internetandpsychiatry.com/wp/editorials/selfie-addiction/

Singh, S. & Tripathi, K.M. (2017). Selfie: A new obsession. SSRN, Located at: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2920945

Painless steal? Another look at shoplifting as an addiction

In a previous 2014 blog, I looked at the psychology of shoplifting (which I called ‘Men of Steal’) based on the work of American psychologist John C. Brady (who’s upcoming book is also entitled ‘Men of Steal’). Brady is a really engaging writer and he recently published an article in Counsellor magazine on celebrity theft and why for some people it should be classed as an addiction.

Brady briefly recounted the cases of three celebrities who had been caught shoplifting (Lindsay Lohan, Kim Richards, and Winona Ryder – click on the links to get the stories of each of these celebrity shoplifting stories). Other famous celebrity shoplifters include Britney Spears, Megan Fox, Kristin Cavallari, Farrah Fawcett, and WWE Diva Emma (if you’re really interested in these and other celebrity shoplifters, then check out this story in Rebel Circus). According to Dr. Brady “psychological analysis reveals they are not greedy, rather they are addicted to the ‘rush’ associated with theft” and that there is an ‘addictive criminal syndrome’.

Brady’s article used the ‘celebrity’ angle as the ‘hook’ to write more generally about ‘shoplifting addictions’ and briefly outlined the cases of three high profile ‘theft addicts’:

“The first man is Bruce McNall, former LA Kings owner, Hollywood film producer, and a convicted felon. He received five years in Lompoc Federal Prison for stealing $238 million. The second man, John Spano, former owner of the New York Islanders, went off to two terms in federal prisons for stealing $80 million. He is currently an inmate in an Ohio prison doing ten more years for a crime he did not originate. Finally, William “Boots” Del Biaggio III, former Silicon Valley venture capitalist operator and founder of Heritage Bank in San Jose, graduated in 2016 from eight years at Lompoc for fraud. He stole $110 million to buy the Nashville Predators hockey team. He later expressed regret—maybe too little too late”.

Brady believes that these individuals had a behavioural addiction to stealing. The cases he outlined were all true and were examples of what Brady described as “elite offenders who became addicted to the rush connected to stealing”. Some commonalities between the three individuals was noted: they were charming, deceptive, had personalities that were outgoing, never used violence or aggression in the carrying out of their thefts, and (in Brady’s view) were addicted to crime. Like many addicts, they harmed themselves, their families, and their communities as a consequence of their behaviour.

The idea of being addicted to crime is not new, and the addiction components model that I have developed over the last couple of decades was based on that of one of my mentors – Iain Brown – who used such a model to explain addictive criminal offending in a really good book chapter published back in 1997 (in the book Addicted to Crime? edited by the psychologists John Hodge, Mary McMurran and Clive Hollin – see ‘Further reading’ below). Like me, Brady also read Addicted to Crime? in which it was posited that some criminals appear to become addicted to stealing (and that the act of theft made them feel good psychologically by providing a ‘high’ or a ‘rush’ similar to the feelings individuals experience when they ingest psychoactive substances). Brady argues that an addiction to stealing is a behavioural addiction and that it is “functionally equivalent” to substance-based addictions for two main reasons: that theft addicts (i) “generally derive the same initial uplifting, euphoric, and subjective sensations similar to substance abusers”, and (ii) “are almost blindly driven toward their goal and they cannot stop their self-defeating behaviors”.   

Brady contends that there are five addictive criminal stages of what he terms “the zone”: (i) criminal triggers, (ii) moral neutralisation, (iii) commission of the criminal act, (iv) post-criminal-act exhilaration, and (v) post-criminal-act confusion. Brady asserts:

“The five addictive stages comprising the criminal addictive zone helps explain why certain offenders arrived at such low points in their lives and progressively became drawn deeper into the addictive zone. Because these three men became frozen into one or more of these stages, they simply could not easily find an exit sign. I have applied this criminal zonal theory to a variety of deviant groups, including white-collar deviants and now to these three elite, nonviolent bank robbers. An analysis of the criminal addictive personality forms the foundation of the addictive zone. This zone is marked with multiple, negative psychological forces evidenced during each of the five stages…The movement through these overlapping stages results in a negative, criminological, transformative process during which theft addicts surrender their prior noncriminal status (positive), thereby adopting a new deviant one (negative)…After entering into this enigmatic zone, offenders often become locked into one or more of these overlapping stages. The one factor that remains constant is that the progression through these five stages dramatically and unalterably changed these men’s lives, their victims’ lives, and the lives of people around them”.

Brady’s five addictive criminal stages are:

• Criminal triggers – In the first stage. these internal triggers revolve around salience and low self-esteem and comprise “confusing and mostly illogical thoughts” that criminals acquire. These negative thoughts are “reflective of peoples’ compromised self-concepts coupled with the desire to overcompensate for perceived personal shortcomings” and primarily originate from feelings of loneliness, emptiness, and inadequacy.
• Moral neutralisation – In the second stage, Brady claims that this stage is the most complex and essential of all the stages and is rooted in conflict. The destructive and self-defeating behaviour that criminals experience is not driven by material (economic) motives but is simply individuals “trying to enrich their empty shell identities” and fuelled by irrational thoughts of wanting to prove to significant others that they are really important. These motives may be completely unconscious
• Commission of the criminal act – In the third stage, the actual carrying out of the criminal acts demands that criminals “neutralize the unsavory aspects of their offenses…and lend meaning to inexplicable behaviors”. The more a criminal engages in the activity the more criminals become “skilled practitioners in the art of self-deception”. Here, the criminal behaviour is paired with “exciting sensations” associated with the risk of engaging in criminal activity (“an anticipated visceral feeling or mental excitement and stimulation, if not an elation, a thrill, a rush, and even a sense of euphoria”). In short, the euphoric sensations experienced reinforce the criminal behaviour.
• Post-criminal-act exhilaration – In the fourth stage, Brady claims there is typically a “flooding of mood-elevating feelings similar to an adrenaline rush, accompanied with thoughts that synthetically increase their sense of well-being” and what my mentor Iain Brown refers to as “hedonic mood management”. In short, the criminal act can help individuals feel like “bigshots” and criminals may justify doing something bad because it makes them feel so good. Brady also claims that many of these exhilarating feelings “manifest themselves on an unconscious level that is easily experienced, yet not easily comprehended by a theft addict”
• Post-criminal-act confusion – In the fifth stage, Brady claims that the mood modifying experiences in the third and fourth stages are “replaced with new, dramatic, and unexpected changes in the offenders’ emotional awareness”. Here, criminals become confused, depressed and socially withdrawn, as well as experiencing withdrawal-like reactions (e.g., sweating, headaches, anxiety, nausea, heart arrhythmia, etc.). Brady says that on a psychological level, the fifth stage five is characterized by “confusion, guilt, afterthoughts, misgivings, anxiety, depression, and dramatic mood shifts ranging from feelings of sadness to hopelessness”. It is also during this stage that criminals might start to show signs of remorse.

Brady concludes that for the criminals he has known and treated “used the stolen money to boost their status and enhance their enormous egos so they could attain ‘big shot’ fame”. I find this last observation interesting given a previous blog that I wrote on fame being addictive. I’ve also written other blogs on addictive criminal behaviour (such as joy-riding).

I am of the opinion that specific types of crime can be classed as an addictive behaviour because addictions rely on constant rewards (i.e., reinforcement) and crime can provide many rewarding experiences (both financially and psychologically), at least in the short-term. I’m not for one-minute condoning such behaviour, just simply stating my opinion that I believe it’s theoretically possible to become addicted to activities such as stealing.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Brady, J.C. (2013). Why Rich Women Shoplift – When They Have It All. San Jose, CA: Western Psych Press.

Brady, J.C. (2017) Celebrity theft: Unmasking addictive criminal intent. Counselor, July/August. Located at: http://www.counselormagazine.com/detailpageoverride.aspx?pageid=1729&id=15032386763

Brown, I. (1997). A theoretical model of the behavioral addictions: Applied to offending. In J.E. Hodge, M. McMurran, & C.R. Hollin (Eds.), Addicted to crime? (pp. 15–63). Chichester: Wiley.

Hodge, J.E., McMurran, M., & Hollin, C.R. (1997). Addicted to crime? Chichester: Wiley.

Shulman, T.D. (2011). Cluttered Lives, Empty Souls – Compulsive Stealing, Spending and Hoarding. West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing.

Soriano, M. (2015). 15 celebrities who were caught shoplifting. Rebel Circus, May 13. Located at: http://www.rebelcircus.com/blog/celebrities-caught-shoplifting/

We can work it out: A brief look at ‘entrepreneurship addiction’

Last month, a paper appeared online in the journal Academy of Management (AJM). I’d never heard of the journal before but its remit is “publish empirical research that tests, extends, or builds management theory and contributes to management practice”. The paper I came across was entitled ‘Entrepreneurship addiction: Shedding light on the manifestation of the ‘dark side’ in work behavior patterns’ – and is an addiction that I’d never heard of before. The authors of the paper – April Spivack and Alexander McKelvie – define ‘entrepreneurship addiction’ as “the excessive or compulsive engagement in entrepreneurial activities that results in a variety of social, emotional, and/or physiological problems and that despite the development of these problems, the entrepreneur is unable to resist the compulsion to engage in entrepreneurial activities”. Going by the title of the paper alone, I assumed ‘entrepreneurship addiction’ was another name for ‘work addiction’ or ‘workaholism’ but the authors state:

“We address what is unique about this type of behavioral addiction compared to related work pattern concepts of workaholism, entrepreneurial passion, and work engagement. We identify new and promising areas to expand understanding of what factors lead to entrepreneurship addiction, what entrepreneurship addiction leads to, how to effectively study entrepreneurship addiction, and other applications where entrepreneurship addiction might be relevant to study. These help to set a research agenda that more fully addresses a potential ‘dark side’ psychological factor among some entrepreneurs”.

The paper is a theoretical paper and doesn’t include any primary data collection. The authors had published a previous 2014 paper in the Journal of Business Venturing, on the same topic (‘Habitual entrepreneurs: Possible cases of entrepreneurship addiction?’) based on case study interviews with two habitual entrepreneurs. In that paper the authors argued that addiction symptoms can manifest in the entrepreneurial context. Much of the two papers uses the ‘workaholism’ literature to ground the term but the authors do view ‘entrepreneurship addiction’ and ‘work addiction’ as two separate entities (although my own view is that entrepreneurship addiction’ is a sub-type of ‘work addiction’ based on what I’ve read – in fact I would argue that all ‘entrepreneurship addicts’ are work addicts but not all work addicts are ‘entrepreneurship addicts’). Spivak and McKelvie are right to assert that “entrepreneurship addiction is a relatively new term and represents an emerging area of inquiry” and that “reliable prevalence rates are currently unknown”.

The aim of the AJM paper is to “situate entrepreneurship addiction as a distinct concept” and to examine entrepreneurship addiction in relation to other similar work patterns (i.e., workaholism, work engagement, and entrepreneurial passion). Like my own six component model of addiction, Spivak and McKelvie also have six components (and are similar to my own) which are presented below verbatim from their AJM paper:

• Obsessive thoughts – constantly thinking about the behavior and continually searching for novelties within the behavior;
• Withdrawal/engagement cycles – feeling anticipation and undertaking ritualized behavior, experiencing anxiety or tension when away, and giving into a compulsion to engage in the behavior whenever possible;
• Self-worth – viewing the behavior as the main source of self-worth;
• Tolerance – making increasing resource (e.g., time and money) investments;
• Neglect – disregarding or abandoning previously important friends and activities;
• Negative outcomes – experiencing negative emotional outcomes (e.g., guilt, lying, and withholding information about the behavior from others), increased or high levels of strain, and negative physiological/health outcomes.

As in my own writings on work addiction (see ‘Further reading’ below), Spivak and McKelvie also note that even when addicted, there may still be some positive outcomes and/or benefits from such behaviour (as can be found in other behavioural addictions such as exercise addiction). As noted in the AJM paper:

“Some of these positive outcomes may include benefits to the business venture including quick responsiveness to competitive pressures or customer demands and high levels of innovation, while benefits to the individual may include high levels of autonomy, financial security, and job satisfaction. It is the complexity of these relationships, or the combined positive and negative outcomes, that may obscure the dysfunctional dark side elements of entrepreneurship addiction”.

Spivak and McKelvie also go to great lengths to differentiate entrepreneurship addiction from workaholism (although I ought to point out, I have recently argued in a paper in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions [‘Ten myths about work addiction’] that ‘workaholism’ and ‘work addiction’ are not the same thing, and outlined in a previous blog). Spivak and McKelvie concede that entrepreneurship addiction is a “sister construct” to ‘workaholism’ because of the core elements they have in common. More specifically, in relation to similarities, they assert:

“Workaholism, like entrepreneurship addiction, emphasizes the compulsion to work, working long hours, obsessive thoughts that extend beyond the domain of work, and results in some of the negative outcomes that have been linked to entrepreneurship addiction, including difficulties in social relationships and diminished physical health (Spivack et al., 2014). Some of the conceptualizations of workaholism draw from the literature on psychological disorders. Similarly, we recognize and propose that there may be significant overlap with various psychological conditions among those that develop entrepreneurship addiction, including, but not limited to, obsessive compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, and ADD/ADHD”.

However, they then do on to describe what they feel are the practical and conceptual distinctions between entrepreneurship addiction and workaholism. More specifically, they argue that:

“(M)ost workaholics are embedded within existing firms and are delegated tasks and resources in line with the organization’s mission, often in a team-based structure. Most workaholics work on these assigned projects with intensity and some will do so with high levels of engagement, as specified in previous literature. But, in reward for their efforts, many employed workaholics may be limited to receiving recognition and performance bonuses. As a team member employed within the structures of an existing organization, the individual’s contribution to organizational outcomes may be obfuscated just as the reciprocal impact of organizational performance (whether negative or positive) on the individual may be buffered (i.e., there is little chance an employee will lose their home if the business doesn’t perform well). In contrast, entrepreneurs, by definition, are proactive creators of their work context. They are responsible for a myriad of decisions and actions both within and outside of the scope of their initial expertise, and are challenged to situate their work within a dynamic business environment. Entrepreneurs are more clearly linked with their work, as they are responsible for acquiring the resources and implementing them in unique business strategies to create a new entity”.

I would argue that many of the things listed here are not unique to entrepreneurs as I could argue that in my own job as a researcher that I also have many of the benefits outlined above (because within flexible parameters I have a job that I can do what I want, when I want, how I want, and with who I want – there are so many possible rewards in the job I do that it isn’t that far removed from entrepreneurial activity – in fact some of my job now actually includes entrepreneurial activity). As Spivak and McKelvie then go on to say:

“As a result of the intense qualities of the entrepreneurial experience, there are also more intense potential outcomes, whether rewards or punishments in financial, social, and psychological domains. For example, potential rewards for entrepreneurs extend far beyond supervisor recognition and pay bonuses, into the realm of public awareness of accomplishments (or failures), media heralding, and life-changing financial gains or losses. Entrepreneurship addiction thereby moves beyond workaholism into similarities with gambling because of the intensity of the experience and personal risk tied to outcomes”.

I’m not sure I would agree with the gambling analogy, but I agree with the broad thrust of what is being argued (but would still say that entrepreneurship addiction is a sub-type of work addiction). I ought to add that there has also been discussion about the risk of overabundance of unsubstantiated addictive disorders. For instance, in a 2015 paper in the Journal of Behavioral Addiction, Joel Billieux and his colleagues described a hypothetical case of someone they deem fitting into the criteria of the concept of “research addiction” (maybe they had someone like myself in mind?), invented for the purpose of the argument. However, it is worthwhile noting that if their hypothetical example of ‘research addiction’ already fits well into the persisting compulsive over-involvement in job/study to the exclusion of other spheres of life, and if it leads to serious harm (and conflict symptoms suggest that it may) then it could be argued that the person is addicted to work. What we could perhaps agree on, is that for the example of ‘research addiction’ we do not have to invent a new addiction, (just as we do not distinguish between vodka addicts, gin addicts or whisky addicts as there is the overarching construct of alcoholism). Maybe the same argument can be made for entrepreneurship addiction in relation to work addiction.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Andreassen, C. S., Griffiths, M. D., Hetland, J., Kravina, L., Jensen, F., & Pallesen, S. (2014). The prevalence of workaholism: A survey study in a nationally representative sample of norwegian employees. PLoS ONE, 9, e102446. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0102446

Andreassen, C. S., Griffiths, M. D., Hetland, J., & Pallesen, S. (2012). Development of a work addiction scale. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 53, 265–272. doi:10.1111/sjop.2012.53.issue-3

Andreassen, C. S., Griffiths, M. D., Sinha, R., Hetland, J., & Pallesen, S. (2016) The Relationships between workaholism and symptoms of psychiatric disorders: A large-scale cross-sectional study. PLoS ONE, 11: e0152978. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0152978

Billieux, J., Schimmenti, A., Khazaal, Y., Maurage, P., & Heeren, A. (2015). Are we overpathologizing everyday life? A tenable blueprint for behavioral addiction research. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 4, 142–144.

Brown, R. I. F. (1993). Some contributions of the study of gambling to the study of other addictions. In W.R. Eadington & J. Cornelius (Eds.), Gambling Behavior and Problem Gambling (pp. 341-372). Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press.

Griffiths, M. D. (1996). Behavioural addictions: An issue for everybody? Journal of Workplace Learning, 8(3), 19-25.

Griffiths, M.D. (2005). Workaholism is still a useful construct. Addiction Research and Theory, 13, 97-100.

Griffiths, M.D. (2005b). A ‘components’ model of addiction within a biopsychosocial framework. Journal of Substance Use, 10, 191–197

Griffiths, M.D. (2011). Workaholism: A 21^st century addiction. The Psychologist: Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 24, 740-744.

Griffiths, M.D., Demetrovics, Z. & Atroszko, P.A. (2018). Ten myths about work addiction. Journal of Behavioral Addictions. Epu ahead of print. doi: 10.1556/2006.7.2018.05

Griffiths, M.D. & Karanika-Murray, M. (2012). Contextualising over-engagement in work: Towards a more global understanding of workaholism as an addiction. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 1(3), 87-95.

Paksi, B., Rózsa, S., Kun, B., Arnold, P., Demetrovics, Z. (2009). Addictive behaviors in Hungary: The methodology and sample description of the National Survey on Addiction Problems in Hungary (NSAPH). [in Hungarian] Mentálhigiéné és Pszichoszomatika, 10(4), 273-300.

Quinones, C., & Griffiths, M. D. (2015). Addiction to work: A critical review of the workaholism construct and recommendations for assessment. Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services, 10, 48–59.

Spivack, A., & McKelvie, A. (2017). Entrepreneurship addiction: Shedding light on the manifestation of the ‘dark side’ in work behavior patterns. The Academy of Management Perspectives. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2016.0185

Spivack, A. J., McKelvie, A., & Haynie, J. M. (2014). Habitual entrepreneurs: Possible cases of entrepreneurship addiction? Journal of Business Venturing, 29(5), 651-667.

Sussman, S., Lisha, N. & Griffiths, M.D. (2011). Prevalence of the addictions: A problem of the majority or the minority? Evaluation and the Health Professions, 34, 3-56.

Higher and higher: A brief look at rock climbing as an addiction

In previous blogs I have looked at the alleged addictiveness of extreme sports including BASE jumping and bungee jumping as well as briefly overviewing so called ‘adrenaline junkies’. Over the last year, a couple of papers by Robert Heirene, David Shearer, and Gareth Roderique-Davies have looked at the addictive properties of rock climbing specifically concentrating on withdrawal symptoms and craving.

In the first paper on withdrawal symptoms published last year in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, the authors highlighted some previous research suggesting that there are similarities in the phenomenology of substance-related addictions and extreme sports. For instance, they noted:

Extreme sports athletes commonly describe a “rush” or “high” when participating in their sport (Buckley, 2012; Price & Bundesen, 2005) and liken these experiences to those of drug users (Willig, 2008). For example, a participant in Willig’ s study described: “It’s like for a drug user, they will take cocaine to get high. For me it’s my addiction, I have to go to the mountains to get high.”  Similarly, skydivers have described their sport as “like an addiction,” stating that they “can’t get enough,” and their “relationships suffer” as a result (Celsi, Rose, & Leigh, 1993).”

They also noted prior research suggesting that athletes may experience withdrawal states during periods of abstinence that are also characteristic of those with an addiction. Heirene and his colleagues claimed that this their study was the first to explore withdrawal experiences of individuals engaged in extreme sports. They carried out a study very similar to one of my own where Michael Smeaton and I published a study where gamblers were specifically interviewed about their experiences of withdrawal (in a 2002 issue of Social Psychological Review).

Young woman lead climbing in cave, male climber belaying

Heirene’s team used semi-structured interviews to explore withdrawal experiences of what they defined as ‘high ability’ and ‘average-ability’ male rock climbers during periods of abstinence (four climbers in each of the two groups). They then investigated the behavioural and psychological and aspects of withdrawal (including craving, anhedonia [i.e., the inability to feel pleasure in normally pleasurable activities], and negative affect) and examined the differences in the frequency and intensity of these states between the two rock climbing groups. Based on an analysis of the interview transcripts, they found support for the existence of anhedonia, craving, and negative affect among rock climbers. They also reported that the effects were more pronounced and intense among the high ability rock climbers (apart from anhedonic symptoms). The authors also noted:

“All participants reported negative affective experiences during abstinence, including states of “restlessness” and being “miserable,” “agitated,” or “frustrated.” Similar dysphoric states have been identified in drug users, exercise addicts, and extreme sports athletes during abstinence…In the present study, both groups reported using climbing to alleviate negative affective states, particularly stress. This finding supports previous research that has reported skydivers use their sport in a self-medicating manner (Price & Bundesen, 2005). Similarly, psychopharmacology literature has found individuals engage in substance abuse as a means of coping with stress…suggesting similar participation motives in both drug use and extreme sports”.

The study concluded that based on self-report, rock climbers experienced genuine withdrawal symptoms during abstinence from climbing and that these were comparable to individuals with substance and other behavioral addictions. In a second investigation just published in Frontiers in Psychology, the same team (this time led by Gareth Roderique-Davies) reported the development of the Rock Climbing Craving Questionnaire (RCCQ). The development of this new psychometric instrument directly followed on from the previous study which had found evidence of craving amongst the rock climbers that had been interviewed.

In the second paper, the research team attempted to “quantitatively measure the craving experienced by participants of any extreme sports”. They claimed that the RCCQ could allow “a greater understanding of the craving experienced by extreme sports athletes and a comparison of these across sports (e.g., surfing) and activities (e.g., drug-use)”. To develop the RCCQ, they utilized previously validated craving measures as a template for the new instrument to assess craving in the sports of rock-climbing and mountaineering.

The second paper comprised two studies. The first study investigated the factor structure of the craving measure among 407 climbers who completed the RCCQ. (One of the limitations of the study was that the participant sample was heterogeneous and included climbers and mountaineers from multiple primary climbing disciplines, including indoor climbing, outdoor traditional climbing, alpine climbing, and ice climbing). Despite the heterogeneity of the sample, the results demonstrated that a three-factor model explained just over half the total variance in item scores. The three factors (‘positive reinforcement’, ‘negative reinforcement’ and ‘urge to climb’) each comprised five items. The second study validated the 15-item RCCQ on 254 climbers using confirmatory factor analysis across two conditions (a ‘climbing-related cue’ condition or a ‘cue-neutral’ condition). The authors concluded that:

“[The first study supported] the multi-dimensional nature of rock climbing craving and shows parallels with substance-related craving in reflecting intention and positive (desire) and negative (withdrawal) reinforcement. [The second study confirmed] this factor structure and gives initial validation to the measure with evidence that these factors are sensitive to cue exposure…if as shown here, craving for climbing (and potentially other extreme sports) is similar to that experienced by drug-users and addicts, there is the potential that climbing and other extreme sports could be used as a replacement therapy for drug users”.

This latter suggestion has been made in the literature dating back to the 1970s and the work of Dr. Bill Glasser on ‘positive addictions’ as well as by psychologists such as Iain Brown who suggested in the early 1990s that gambling addicts should replace their addictions with sensation-seeking activities such as sky-diving and parachuting. Critics will claim that these papers are another example of ‘over-pathologizing’ everyday behaviours, but as I have always argued, if any behaviour fulfils all the core criteria for addiction, they should be operationalised as such.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Brymer, E., & Schweitzer, R. (2013). Extreme sports are good for your health: a phenomenological understanding of fear and anxiety in extreme sport. Journal of health psychology, 18(4), 477-487.

Buckley, R. (2012). Rush as a key motivation in skilled adventure tourism: Resolving the risk recreation paradox. Tourism Management, 33, 961–970.

Castanier, C., Le Scanff, C., & Woodman, T. (2010). Who takes risks in high-risk sports? A typological personality approach. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 81, 478–484.

Celsi, R. L., Rose, R. L., & Leigh, T. W. (1993). An exploration of high risk leisure consumption through skydiving. Journal of Consumer Research, 20(1), 1–23.

Glasser, W. (1976). Positive Addictions. New York: Harper & Row.

Griffiths, M.D.  (2005). A ‘components’ model of addiction within a biopsychosocial framework. Journal of Substance Use, 10, 191-197.

Griffiths, M.D. & Smeaton, M. (2002). Withdrawal in pathological gamblers: A small qualitative study. Social Psychology Review, 4, 4-13.

Heirene, R. M., Shearer, D., Roderique-Davies, G., & Mellalieu, S. D. (2016). Addiction in extreme sports: An exploration of withdrawal states in rock climbers. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 5(2), 332-341.

Larkin, M. & Griffiths, M.D. (2004). Dangerous sports and recreational drug-use: Rationalising and contextualising risk. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 14, 215-232.

Monasterio, E., & Mei-Dan, O. (2008). Risk and severity of injury in a population of BASE jumpers. New Zealand Medical Journal, 121, 70–75.

Monasterio, E., Mulder, R., Frampton, C., & Mei-Dan, O. (2012). Personality characteristics of BASE jumpers. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 24, 391-400.

Price, I. R., & Bundesen, C. (2005). Emotional changes in skydivers in relation to experience. Personality and Individual Differences, 38, 1203–1211.

Roderique-Davies, G. R. D., Heirene, R. M., Mellalieu, S., & Shearer, D. A. (2018). Development and initial validation of a rock climbing craving questionnaire (RCCQ). Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 204. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00204

Willig, C. (2008). A phenomenological investigation of the experience of taking part in extreme sports. Journal of Health Psychology, 13(5), 690-702.

Screenage rampage: What should parents know about videogame playing for children?

Last month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that it was planning to include ‘Gaming Disorder’ (GD) in the latest edition of the International Classification of Diseases. This followed the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to include ‘Internet Gaming Disorder’ in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013. According to the WHO, an individual with GD is a person who lets playing video games “take precedence over other life interests and daily activities,” resulting in “negative consequences” such as “significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning.”

I have been researching videogame addiction for nearly 30 years, and during that time I have received many letters, emails, and telephone calls from parents wanting advice concerning videogames. Typical examples include ‘Is my child playing too much?’, ‘Will playing videogames spoil my pupils’ education?’, ‘Are videogames bad for children’s health? and ‘How do I know if a child is spending too long playing videogames?’ To answer these and other questions in a simple and helpful way, I have written this article as a way of disseminating this information quickly and easily.

To begin with parents should begin by finding out what videogames their children are actually playing! Parents might find that some of them contain material that they would prefer them not to be having exposure to. If they have objections to the content of the games they should facilitate discussion with children about this, and if appropriate, have a few rules. A few aims with children should be:

• To help them choose suitable games which are still fun
• To talk with them about the content of the games so that they understand the difference between make-believe and reality
• To discourage solitary game playing
• To guard against obsessive playing
• To follow recommendations on the possible risks outlined by videogame manufacturers
• To ensure that they have plenty of other activities to pursue in their free time besides the playing of videogames

Parents need to remember that in the right context videogames can be educational (helping children to think and learn more quickly), can help raise a child’s self-esteem, and can increase the speed of their reaction times. Parents can also use videogames as a starting point for other activities like painting, drawing, acting or storytelling. All of these things will help a child at school. It needs to be remembered that videogame playing is just one of many activities that a child can do alongside sporting activities, school clubs, reading and watching the television. These can all contribute to a balanced recreational diet.

The most asked question a parent wants answering is ‘How much videogame playing is too much? To help answer this question I devised the following checklist. It is designed to check if a child’s videogame playing is getting out of hand. Ask these simple questions. Does your child:

• Play videogames every day?
• Often play videogames for long periods (e.g., 3 to 6 hours at a time)?
• Play videogames for excitement or ‘buzz’ or as a way of forgetting about other things in their life?
• Get restless, irritable, and moody if they can’t play videogames?
• Sacrifice social and sporting activities to play videogames?
• Play videogames instead of doing their homework?
• Try to cut down the amount of videogame playing but can’t?

If the answer is ‘yes’ to more than four of these questions, then your child may be playing too much. But what can you do if your child is playing videogames too much?

• First of all, check the content of the games. Try and give children games that are educational rather than the violent ones. Parents usually have control over what their child watches on television – videogames should not be any different.
• Secondly, try to encourage video game playing in groups rather than as a solitary activity. This will lead to children talking and working together.
• Thirdly, set time limits on children’s playing time. Tell them that they can play for a couple of hours after they have done their homework or their chores – not before.
• Fourthly, parents should always get their children to follow the recommendations by the videogame manufacturers (e.g., sit at least two feet from the screen, play in a well-lit room, never have the screen at maximum brightness, and never play videogames when feeling tired).

I have spent many years examining both the possible dangers and the potential benefits of videogame playing. Evidence suggests that in the right context videogames can have positive health and educational benefits to a large range of different sub-groups. What is also clear from the case studies displaying the more negative consequences of playing is that they all involved children who were excessive users of videogames. From prevalence studies in this area, there is little evidence of serious acute adverse effects on health from moderate play. In fact, in some of my studies, I found that moderate videogame players were more likely to have friends, do homework, and engage in sporting activities, than those who played no videogames at all.

For excessive videogame players, adverse effects are likely to be relatively minor, and temporary, resolving spontaneously with decreased frequency of play, or to affect only a small subgroup of players. Excessive players are the most at-risk from developing health problems although more research is needed. If care is taken in the design, and if they are put into the right context, videogames have the potential to be used as training aids in classrooms and therapeutic settings, and to provide skills in psychomotor coordination, and in simulations of real life events (e.g., training recruits for the armed forces).

Every week I receive emails from parents claiming that their sons are addicted to playing online games or that their daughters are addicted to social media. When I ask them why they think this is the case, they almost all reply “because they spend most of their leisure time in front of a screen.” This is simply a case of parents pathologising their children’s behaviour because they think what they are doing is “a waste of time.” I always ask parents the same three things in relation to their child’s screen use. Does it affect their schoolwork? Does it affect their physical education? Does it affect their peer development and interaction? Usually parents say that none of these things are affected so if that is the case, there is little to worry about when it comes to screen time. Parents also have to bear in mind that this is how today’s children live their lives. Parents need to realise that excessive screen time doesn’t always have negative consequences and that the content and context of their child’s screen use is more important than the amount of screen time.

(N.B. This article is an extended version of an article that was originally published by Parent Zone)

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Griffiths, M.D. (2003).  Videogames: Advice for teachers and parents. Education and Health, 21, 48-49.

Griffiths, M.D. (2009). Online computer gaming: Advice for parents and teachers. Education and Health, 27, 3-6.

Griffiths, M.D., Kuss, D.J. & King, D.L. (2012). Video game addiction: Past, present and future. Current Psychiatry Reviews, 8, 308-318.

Griffiths, M.D., Kuss, D.J. & Pontes, H. (2016). A brief overview of Internet Gaming Disorder and its treatment. Australian Clinical Psychologist, 2(1), 20108.

Griffiths, M.D. & Meredith, A. (2009). Videogame addiction and treatment. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 39(4), 47-53.

King, D.L., Delfabbro, P.H. & Griffiths, M.D. (2012). Clinical interventions for technology-based problems: Excessive Internet and video game use. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy: An International Quarterly, 26, 43-56.

King, D.L., Delfabbro, P.H., Griffiths, M.D. & Gradisar, M. (2012). Cognitive-behavioural approaches to outpatient treatment of Internet addiction in children and adolescents. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 68, 1185-1195.

Király, O., Nagygyörgy, K., Griffiths, M.D. & Demetrovics, Z. (2014). Problematic online gaming. In K. Rosenberg & L. Feder (Eds.), Behavioral Addictions: Criteria, Evidence and Treatment (pp.61-95). New York: Elsevier.

Kuss, D.J. & Griffiths, M.D. (2012). Online gaming addiction in adolescence: A literature review of empirical research. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 1, 3-22.

Kuss, D.J. & Griffiths, M.D. (2012). Internet gaming addiction: A systematic review. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 10, 278-296.

Stammer time: A brief look at psellismophilia

Over the Christmas holiday I received a notification from Google to say that my work on sexual paraphilias had been cited in an article entitled ‘Forget feet, meet the fetishists turned on by insects, stuttering and stairs’ on the Shoofee website. The article was a brief overview of seven paraphilias and fetishes, and many of those listed referred readers to articles on my personal blog. Of the seven listed, I had already written articles on six of them but I had never done one on the seventh – psellismophilia.

According to Dr. Anil Aggrawal in his 2009 book Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices, psellismophilia is a paraphilia that involves becoming sexually aroused by stuttering. Psellismophilia is another paraphilia whose name has been derived as being the opposite of a specific phobia (i.e., psellismophobia, an irrational and persistent fear of stuttering). According to the Massive Phobia website, the root word ‘psellismo’ is the Greek word for ‘stammering’. The Phobia Source website notes stuttering as:

“A speech disorder wherein sounds, syllables or words are repeated or prolonged and this disrupts the normal flow of speech. This affects a person’s quality of life because people find it difficult to communicate with others and people might have also a hard time understanding people who stutter or might find it even annoying. Stuttering can be a source of ridicule and humiliation and this can lead to a full blown phobia called psellismophobia…We must remember that stuttering is not equivalent to lack of intelligence. In fact, most people who stutter are extremely intelligent and is said to be that their brains process their thoughts too fast and their speech can’t cope up with their thoughts”.

As with any human behaviour that I know little about, I first did a search on Google Scholar and found that no article had ever been written on the topic. I then did a simple search on Google and again found that no articles had ever been done on the behaviour. However, there were plenty of articles that mentioned it in passing including articles in The Huffington Post (‘46 sexual fetishes you’ve never heard of’), Crave Online (‘15 bizarre sexual fetishes you’ve probably never heard of’), The Buzz (‘15 bizarre/disgusting sexual fetishes you’ve probably never heard of!’), The Thrillist (‘20 bizarre sexual fetishes you never knew existed’), The Sex Health Mag (‘The 10 strange sexual fetishes you’ve probably never heard of’), The Hook Mag (‘20 of the most f**ked up sexual fetishes you’d prefer not to know about’), and The Inked Mag (‘50 shades of weird. 49 of the most bizarre sex fetishes!’). Not one of these articles had anything more than a one-line definition (typically describing the condition as an abnormal affection and/or love for stuttering). The article in Shoofee, did offer a little more in the way of explanation:

“Stuttering affects one percent of the world’s population and many sufferers find themselves the butt of jokes. But if they were to come across a psellismophiliac they could find that their speech is an instant aphrodisiac, for this is a fetish which involves arousal to stuttering. Natalie, a 22-year-old psellismophiliac, explained her condition on an online psychology forum. ‘I feel like I can’t date regularly because I won’t be sexually interested in anyone who doesn’t have a stammer,’ she wrote. Natalie added that when she mentioned it to boyfriends they tried to pretend to stutter but she said it failed to arouse her like the real thing”.

Given the complete lack of information on whether there are individuals who are sexually aroused by stuttering I began trawling various online forums and began to find individuals who confessed online that stuttering was something they found sexually arousing (or claim to know those who are). Obviously I have no way of knowing the veracity of the claims made, but most appeared to be genuine to me. Here are some extracts:

• Extract 1: “I am a girl who finds listening to a guy stutter and struggle extremely sexy… no there is very little on the internet about it, guess there’s not many of us out there, but you’re not alone” (Lickerish, female, heterosexual).
• Extract 2: “I’m a guy who gets turned on by listening to a girl stutter, and I’ve never been able to figure out why…There’s hardly anything on the internet about it, other than this thread and a few random ‘stuttering is sexy’ one-liners on other sites…But yeah, there are a few of us out there, and it’s interesting to know that it’s not limited to just one gender” (Wireless Mike, male, heterosexual).
• Extract 3: “I’ve had this fetish for years (I’m 31 now), but it’s been getting stronger and stronger. I’m a gay guy attracted to other guys who stutter. I’ve met a couple of guys locally and a couple more over Skype. We are still friends with [three] of them – we just drifted apart with the other one since time zones don’t work to our advantage. But I find myself wishing I had more friends who stutter to talk to. It’s both a sexual thing and a non-sexual thing… in some ways I prefer chatting with guys who stutter than fluent guys…Does anyone else feel the same? It’s frustrating that I have to work so hard to convince others I’m not crazy” (Jay, male, gay).
• Extract 4: “I had a chick ask me to stutter on her nether regions once. It’s about the closest I’ve seen of a “stuttering fetish” (Zachary, male, heterosexual).
• Extract 5: “I have [a stutter fetish]. I’m female and I like men, but I have this fetish for males and females. I’ve never written this before. Certainly never said it” (Spector, female, bisexual).
• Extract 6: “I don’t have personal experience with people fetishizing stuttering, but I’ve seen it, particularly in smutty fanfiction with ‘nervous’ submissive characters” (Croagunk, male, sexuality unknown).
• Extract 7: “I once dated a girl who confessed during our brief relationship that she thought my stutter was ‘cute’. I’m pretty sure she was into ‘different’ kinds of guys. She would always bring it up and stare at my mouth. It was like a fetish. It was like she had a thing for disabled guys! I broke up with her not because I didn’t like her, just because it freaked me out. Made me feel really uncomfortable” (priateproducer, male, heterosexual).
• Extract 8: “The stutter can be sexy. The thing of gasping for air; moving tongues; flailing lips; breathing. These are sexual motions, these are movements of the mouth, the delicate lips, the waving of the soft tongue. To stutter is to wave the soft flesh of the face in rapid succession…Thinking about stuttering as an intimate act, akin to being naked, may change its constructed meaning and turn it into a moment of closeness with our community” (Zach, male, sexuality unknown)
• Extract 9: “I am a guy who likes guys, and consider myself to have a stuttering fetish…It’s true that there isn’t much [online about] this, but I’ve spoken to 4 or 5 other guys (through the net and on the phone/skype occasionally) who also share this – so I’m not the only one!…I can’t quite explain it, but I really like guys who stutter. Let me say that it has to be more than just that to like a guy, but it helps!…For me, the more severe the stutter the more attractive it is. I’ve spoken to a quite a few guys who stutter and I’ve always been open about this. Some just find it strange or think I’m kidding, but most are really open and relieved to find someone who doesn’t have an issue with it. For me it’s not as simple as just a ‘fetish’, I’ve read a lot about it and can understand a lot about it. I’ve also talked to a couple of guys who like to pretend (even though they’re completely fluent otherwise) and I find that interesting too” (Jay, male, gay).
• Extract 10: “I have a stuttering fetish…I look for videos of stuttering online to watch. The more severe the stutter, the more struggle and secondary characteristics, the better. I stuttered pretty badly as a child, and occasionally still do…It’s nice to know I’m not the only one” (eglorae, gender and sexuality unknown).
• Extract 11: “I’m new on this forum so I was just only browsing and saw the stuttering topic and it immediately caught my attention so…yes I guess I have a soft spot for guys who stutter. It’s not quite a fetish, but I find it really cute and sexy. I used to [have] a crush on a guy when I was like 14 years old and he was a stutterer, oh his speaking was so hot!” (Alexandra, female, heterosexual).
• Extract 12: “Wow, I thought I was the only one and that I was odd! I’m a guy who finds stuttering really sexy in women. No idea why…It’s just something I discovered that I like. I’d love to talk…with some girls who stutter but it seems very unlikely!” (emmanola, male, heterosexual).
• Extract 13: “I have to tell you, that some of the guys I have met have found it an absolute turn on for them. During intimate moments my stuttering gets a lot worse which can send some guys crazy, although admittedly it is a very small number. I never thought it as being a fetish though, but maybe it is. I can’t say that anyone I have met has been actually looking for someone that stutters but rather looked at is a bonus when they found someone that did” (Kenny, male, gay).
• Extract 14: “I stutter and it is a BIG turn-on for me. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one. I would love to talk to another stutterer – especially one who thinks it’s a turn-on” (Stutteringdude, male, gay).

Based on these online self-confessions, a few things can be concluded. Obviously I have no idea about whether these are in any way representative of those individuals who like those that stutter, but if it is a genuine fetish or paraphilia (and some of these individuals claim it is something they like strongly or have a preference for rather than it being a fetish as such), the behaviour appears to prevalent in both men and women and not be associated with one particular sexual orientation as it was described by those both gay and straight. Very few appear to know where their fetish for stuttering originates although some describe memories from adolescence and being sexually aroused in the formative stages of sexual development. Most see the fetish as something that they have kept to themselves without ever having talked to others about it. Some appear to be glad that they ‘are not alone’ in having the fetish and find comfort in hearing others’ stories. Some individuals went as far to offer explanations for the fetish or what it’s not about.

• Extract 15: “‪I think I know what attracts [people] to the stutter. I think it’s most likely the tonality of a stutter. They raise in pitch, repeat syllables that sometimes mirror those of an orgasm or basic sexual moaning. I honestly do think you might find something a bit erotic about how similarly a stutter can mimic that of sexual moan…even the facial expressions made” (aimoo182, gender and sexuality unknown).
• Extract 16: “I’ve also read a bit about stuttering and can understand a lot more than your average guy. I’ve been asked if it’s a [domination] thing…it’s not. I’d happily dom or be dommed by a guy who stutters. Or just hold a nice conversation. It doesn’t matter” (Jay, male, gay).

My own view is that most fetishes and paraphilias appear to begin developing in early adolescence and that classical conditioning (i.e., associative pairing between sexual arousal and the non-sexual stimulus, in this case the stuttering) is an important part of the acquisition process. Little of what I found fits my opinion on this but that’s more because the individuals themselves have little insight to their own behaviour and how the fetish manifested itself. Whether psellismophilia ever becomes the focus of serious academic study remains to be seen but I doubt that it will unless any negative consequences arise from the behaviour (and I have come across nothing suggesting that the condition – if it genuinely exists – is any way detrimental).

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Aggrawal A. (2009). Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Gates, K. (2000). Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex. New York: RE/Search Publications.

Love, B. (1992). Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices. Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books.

Story rebellion: A brief look at ‘news addiction’

Earlier this year, I was contacted by a BBC reporter asking me what the latest research on ‘news addiction’ was. I politely told him I was unaware of any such research and that if ‘news addiction’ existed, it would be more akin to ‘television addiction’ or ‘boxset bingeing’. About a month after that call, a paper on ‘news addiction’ was published in the Journal of the Dow University of Health Sciences Karachi by Pakistani psychologists Ghulam Ishaq, Rafia Rafique, and Muhammad Asif.

I have to admit that some might say I’m a bit of a ‘news junkie’. As soon as I get up in the morning or as soon as I come home from work I switch on the radio or television to listen to the news. However, I do not consider my love of listening to the news to be an addiction, and I suspect most people like me wouldn’t either. Of course, there are now other ways for individuals to get their ‘news fix’ including thousands of online news sites and via social media which is why Ishaq and his colleagues decided to look at the construct of ‘news addiction’. They claimed that:

“People are persuaded towards news. Similarly, engrossment of certain individuals in any domain from politics, sports, global issues, arson or terrorism can also promote news habituation or addiction and intensify inspection towards news. News addiction comes under the term behavioral-related behavior…When somebody interacts with news, this gives him/her satisfying feelings and sensations that he/she is not able to get in other ways. The reinforcement an individual gets from these feelings compels him to repeat their behavior to get these types of feelings and sensations repeatedly… eventually causing a disturbance in every sphere of life… individuals who are addicted to news feel themselves much obsessed to check the news in uncontrollable ways”.

Theoretically there is no reason why individuals cannot be addicted to reading and/or listening to the news as long as they are being constantly rewarded for their behaviour. In fact, the authors used some of my papers on behavioural addiction more generally to argue for the construct of ‘news addiction’ as a construct to be empirically investigated. In their study, Ishaq and colleagues wanted to examine the relationship between (the personality construct of) conscientiousness, neuroticism, self-control, and news addiction. Conscientiousness is a personality trait and refers to individuals who are orderly, careful, and well organised. Neuroticism is another major personality trait and refers to individuals who have high mental instability such as depression and high anxiety. The researchers hypothesised that there would be negative correlation between conscientiousness and news addiction, and that neuroticism would be positively correlated with news addiction.

To test their hypotheses, a survey was completed by 300 participants (aged 18 to 60 years; average age 39 years) from major cities of the Punjab (Lahore, Multan, Bahawalpur, Faisalabad, Sargodha). The authors developed their own 19-item News Addiction Scale (NAS) although the paper didn’t give any examples of any of the items in the NAS. They also administered the ‘Big Five Inventory’ (which assesses five major personality traits – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism). The study found that the hypotheses were supported (i.e., news addiction was positively correlated with neuroticism and negatively correlated with conscientiousness. Previous literature has consistently shown that there is relationship between personality traits and behavioural addiction. The findings of this study are very similar to those more widely in the general literature for both substance and behavioural addictions (which also show most addictions have a low correlation with conscientiousness and a high correlation with neuroticism). The authors also argued that:

“(The findings show that) self-control plays an active role [in] refraining from the instant pleasure of impulse that would hinder with daily functioning and attainment goals…[The] current study findings demonstrated that self-control acts as a mediating variable between conscientiousness, neuroticism and news addiction”.

They also reported that females had higher scores on neuroticism and conscientiousness and that males had higher scores on the News Addiction Scale. The authors also claimed that there was much similarity between social media addiction (although provided no evidence for this except to say that they were both examples of behavioural addiction).

There was no mention at all in the paper about how their participants accessed their news. I access most (but certainly not all) of my news via television and therefore if I was watching an abnormal amount of news on the television, this would more likely be a sub-type of television addiction or a sub-type of television binge-watcher (both of which have been reported in the psychological literature). If someone addictively accessed all their news online or via social media, this could perhaps come under more general umbrella terms such as ‘internet addiction’ or ‘social media addiction’.

However, things are further complicated by the fact that ‘news’ can be defined in a number of ways. In the study by Ishaq and colleagues, news was defined as a “statement of specific information and facts and figures on any substantial event” but such a definition doesn’t take into account such things as political opinions and nor does it define what a ‘substantial event’ is. Given that this is the only study on news addiction that I am aware of, I’ll need a lot more research evidence before I am convinced that it really exists.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Griffiths, M.D. (1996). Behavioural addictions: An issue for everybody? Journal of Workplace Learning, 8(3), 19-25.

Griffiths, M.D.  (2005). A ‘components’ model of addiction within a biopsychosocial framework. Journal of Substance Use, 10, 191-197.

Ishaq, G., Rafique, R., & Asif, M. (2017). Personality traits and news addiction: Mediating role of self-control. Journal of Dow University of Health Sciences, 11(2), 31-53.

Orosz, G., Bőthe, B., & Tóth-Király, I. (2016). The development of the Problematic Series WatchingScale (PSWS). Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 5(1), 144-150.

Orosz, G., Vallerand, R. J., Bőthe, B., Tóth-Király, I., & Paskuj, B. (2016). On the correlates of passion for screen-based behaviors: The case of impulsivity and the problematic and non-problematic Facebook use and TV series watching. Personality and Individual Differences, 101, 167-176.

Sussman, S., & Moran, M.B. (2013). Hidden addiction: Television. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 2(3), 125-132.

Walton-Pattison, E., Dombrowski, S.U. & Presseau, J. (2017). ‘Just one more episode’: Frequency and theoretical correlates of television binge watching. Journal of Health Psychology, doi:1359105316643379

Fanable Collector: A personal insight into the psychology of a record-collecting completist (Part 2)

In a previous blog I briefly outlined the mindset of being an excessive record collecting completist using myself as a case study. That particular article contained some of the extreme and excessive lengths I have gone through on a general level when it comes to collecting music by particular artists. What I thought I would do in this blog is write a brief but more detailed account of my most recent music completist (and some would argue obsessive) activity concerning the British rock band The Move who were active in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I had liked The Move since my early teenage years after buying a 10-track cassette (The Greatest Hits Vol. 1) in my local Woolworths shop in my home town of Loughborough. The cassette was on the budget Pickwick record label and I bought it because it only cost 99p. (In fact, I bought dozens of budget albums at Woolworths in the early 1980s including many Pickwick compilation cassettes and many vinyl records on the MFP [Music for Pleasure] record label mainly because they were priced £1.99 or less and the same price as 12” singles at the time). I had only ever heard a few songs by The Move on BBC Radio 1 (my preferred music station in my teenage years) including ‘Flowers In The Rain’, ‘Fire Brigade’, and ‘I Can Hear The Grass Grow’. Because the cassette featured all three of these songs I bought it on impulse and was not disappointed.

Over the years, the albums that I had on cassette and vinyl were slowly replaced by CDs but The Move’s greatest hits LP was one of the few that slipped through the cracks and which I never got on CD – until about a six weeks ago. As ever, the buying of the CD was an impulse purchase following a ‘You might like…’ recommendation from Amazon. I had just bought a couple of ‘glam rock’ CDs and (as Amazon always do) I got a personal recommendation that I might like The Move’s greatest hits CD because I had bought greatest hits CDs by T-Rex and Slade.

The album that I was recommended was Magnetic Waves of Sound: The Best of The Move, a 21-track LP featuring all their singles and released earlier this year (“magnetic waves of sound” is one of the lyrics from ‘I Can Hear The Grass Grow’ in case you were wondering). I bought it not only because it contained all the 10 tracks that were on my Pickwick label cassette that I bought in the early 1980s, but also because it had an accompanying DVD of many rare performances of The Move on TV from the late 1960s. I ordered the 2-disc set and as soon as it arrived I uploaded it onto my i-Pod and played it repeatedly for the next few days. In fact, I played it three or four times a day for the following week. I absolutely loved it – despite the mixture of different song styles from four different line-ups of the band during the 1967-1972 era.

I haven’t got time to go into the history of the band but most fans of the band tend to differentiate between the line-up featuring Carl Wayne as lead singer (with all the original songs being written by Roy Wood) and the later incarnation after Carl Wayne had left and was replaced by Jeff Lynne (who shared songwriting and lead vocal duties with Roy Wood). Roy Wood and drummer Bev Bevan were the only two in all the different line-ups over the years.

Within a few days of playing the CD, my thirst for The Move was unquenchable. After just four days listening to the ‘best of’ album on repeat, I ordered all four of The Move’s back catalogue studio LPs – Move (1968), Shazam (1970), Looking On (1970), and Message From The Country (1971). Not only were all four albums still available but all had recently been re-released in ‘deluxe’ and remastered editions with many extra discs’ worth of unreleased material including dozens of tracks from BBC radio sessions over the years. The four albums soon arrived and I had eight new discs of music to gorge myself on. They arrived just before I went on my family holiday to the Canary Islands so I had lots of time (without work) to listen to the music on the plane, by the pool, while I was reading, and in when going to bed (I always listen to a couple of LPs in bed every night before I go to sleep).

While I was on holiday I was reading lots of online articles about The Move while listening to their albums. It was at this point that I decided that I had to have every track they’ve ever recorded in my collection (irrespective of whether I like the songs or not). This is one of the worst things about being an avid collector and song completist. I simply have to have every note – good or bad – that has been recorded by the band (including live albums). I soon found out that The Move had only released two live albums (Something Else From The Move and Live At The Fillmore 1969) so I ordered those while I was on holiday (and they were waiting for me on my doormat when I arrived back home). Thankfully, both of these feature lots of songs that are not on any of their four albums and they also happened to be a great band when playing live (but I didn’t know that until after I’d ordered). There was also an LP of session tracks they recorded for the BBC (the unimaginatively titled BBC Sessions) but thankfully all of those tracks (and more) were included as extras on the deluxe editions of their studio LPs (which I already had). Good job too because it sells for hundreds of pounds on sites like Amazon and eBay.

Finally, there were two anthology box sets. The first one (Movements, issued in 1998) was a 3-disc set, but again, all the rare tracks on that set featured in the extras of the more recently remastered deluxe edition versions of their studio LPs (so I decided I didn’t need to get that). However, a more recent 4-disc box set (The Move Anthology 1966-1972, issued in 2008) had lots of tracks and alternate versions of songs that weren’t available anywhere else and exclusive to this particular CD boxset. I went online and found various online websites selling it secondhand for exorbitant prices (around £125; I’d managed to get all the other seven albums for around £80 in total). I would have gladly paid the price for such an overpriced item (and that is another downside of being a completist – we will pay over the odds to complete our collections – even if there is just one or two tracks that I don’t own), but thankfully I found a secondhand set on Discogs for just over £30. Bargain! I quickly ordered it (“only one copy left”) and had it in my possession within 36 hours of ordering. In the space of about three weeks I had completed my collection of everything The Move had legally and commercially produced.

But a completist collectors never end there. We then start to track down illegal bootlegs (typically online but also at various record fairs around the country). We seek out rarer and rarer items and build up a kind of tolerance that can never be totally satisfied until in the possession of new recorded material. I only managed to locate five bootlegs by The Move and there were no tracks on them that didn’t feature in the albums already owned (so I wasn’t tempted to buy any of them – other completists have to own all recorded output irrespective of whether they already have the tracks in question). I then went onto YouTube and found some rare live performances which I converted into MP3s to make my own unofficial rare bootleg LP collection of The Move live. But that still didn’t satisfy my thirst for material by The Move. I wanted more.

Much of the reading I did online about The Move during my summer holiday featured quite a lot on the 1970-1972 period (when Jeff Lynne joined) where there were actually two bands in operation simultaneously – The Move and the embryonic Electric Light Orchestra (ELO). As a child (11-12 years old) I loved E.L.O. and had bought their Discovery album on cassette because I loved the track ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ (and still do to be honest). However, I never realized in my early teens that Jeff Lynne had been in the later line-ups of The Move. Given that the Electric Light Orchestra were actually The Move in all but name at the beginning of the 1970s, I also ended up buying a 2-CD collection called The Harvest Years (a new copy for just £6) featuring all of the tracks on the first two ELO albums (The Electric Light Orchestra and ELO 2) plus dozens of extra outtakes and b-sides. ELO’s mission statement was to produce ‘symphonic’ rock fusing elements of classical music and instrumentation (cellos, violins, etc.) into the rock genre. In fact, the only reason The Move still existed as a band was because they were contractually obligated by their record company to produce two more albums. In reality, Wood and Lynne’s only aim was to get ELO up and running and the first ELO album was recorded at the same time as the last album by The Move. ELO’s first hit single (‘10538 Overture’) was originally recorded as a Move b-side. The Move’s last top ten hit single (‘California Man’) crossed over with ELO’s first top ten hit single in the British charts and had identical core line-ups (Wood, Lynne and Bevan).

 

I then found out that Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood had been friends for years in Birmingham where they both lived and served their musical apprenticeships. In fact, The Move had recorded a demo version of ‘Blackberry Way’ (their only No.1 hit in the UK) in Lynne’s homemade studio while he was lead singer in his own band (The Idle Race). Roy Wood had also asked Lynne to join The Move in 1969 but Lynne felt he could still get somewhere with his own band. The Idle Race were also one of the first bands to perform a cover version of a song by The Move – ‘Here We Go Round The Lemon Tree’). This led me to buying a secondhand copy of the complete (2-CD) recorded works of everything by The Idle Race ever commercially released (Back To The Story) for just £5. Bargain!

But my thirst for Move-related music didn’t end there. I then found out that there were various tracks that Roy Wood had written during his tenure with The Move and Electric Light Orchestra (Mk.1) and that ended up on his subsequent LPs (most noticeably his Boulders album). I subsequently bought Boulders as part of a £10 Roy Wood 5-CD boxset also featuring LPs by his next band Wizzard as well as ELO’s first LP and The Move’s final LP (both of which I already had but £10 for three new albums seemed good value to me). I then bought a ‘greatest hits’ CD of Roy Wood and Wizzard (for a couple of quid).

As I write this, for the last two weeks, I’ve been slowly buying up the rest of ELO’s album back catalogue. For the best part of three decades, ELO were one of my guilty pleasures as I had quite a few of their late 1970s albums on my iPod (as well their Light Years greatest hits collection). I now have all the albums ELO recorded in the 1970s as well as the most recent (2015) platinum-selling Alone In The Universe. I managed to get all of these for less than £20 in total. Bargain! However, whether I will end up being an ELO completist remains to be seen. A lot of their post-1980 output is not something I can honestly say I like. But who knows? As I said above, one of the worst things about being a completist is buying music that we don’t like but collect just to complete our collections. With ELO, it’s definitely a case of ‘Watch this space’.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Brumbeat (2017). The Move. Located at: http://www.brumbeat.net/move.htm

Paytress, M. (2008). Liner notes in book included in the 4-CD The Move Anthology 1966-1972. Salvo/Fly Records.

Van der Kiste, J. (2014). Jeff Lynne: Electric Light Orchestra – Before and After. Stroud: Fonthill Media.

Van der Kiste, J. (2014). Roy Wood: The Move, Wizzard and Beyond. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Wikipedia (2017). Carl Wayne. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Wayne

Wikipedia (2017). Electric Light Orchestra. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Light_Orchestra

Wikipedia (2017). Jeff Lynne. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Lynne

Wikipedia (2017). Roy Wood. Located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Wood

Wikipedia (2017). The Move. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Move

Seedy CD*: A psychologist’s look at the music of Soft Cell

In a previous blog on examining all Adam Ant’s songs about sexual paraphilias, I noted that Soft Cell are probably the only other recording artists who come close to talking about the seedier side of sex. They are also artists that (like one of my other favourite bands, Throbbing Gristle) have never been afraid to sing about taboo topics including prostitution (‘Secret Life’, A Divided Soul’), a housewife’s sexual fantasy about the paper boy (‘Kitchen Sink Drama’), pure hedonism (‘Sensation Nation’), alternative therapies such as colonic irrigation, meditation, and crystal therapy (‘Whatever It Takes’), murder (‘The Best Way To Kill’, ‘Meet Murder My Angel’), suicide (‘Darker Times’, ‘Frustration’ and ‘Down In The Subway’ – “Jump on that train track and die”), incest (‘I Am 16’), psychopathic killers (‘Martin’ based on the story of a serial killer in a film of the same name), shopaholism (‘Whatever It Takes’), anorexia nervosa (‘Excretory Eat Anorexia’), and obsessional cleansing (‘Cleansing Fanatic’), to name but a few.

Soft Cell arguably saw themselves as outside of the norm. Their first official release, an EP entitled ‘Mutant Moments’ EP set out their psychological store (and where ‘Metro Mr. X’ was their “favourite mutant”). They also had a track on the seminal 1980 (various artists) Some Bizarre Album about a disfigured woman (‘The Girl With The Patent Leather Face’). Very few artists would ever sing about such topics (although there are a few exceptions such as Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Hamburger Lady’ based on the medical case notes of a badly burned woman).

Soft Cell’s reputation as a band that focused on the sleazy side of everyday life was cemented after the release of their 1981 debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (NSEC). The cover featured a photo of the band’s two members (Marc Almond and Dave Ball) taken outside the Raymond Revue Bar, a notorious strip joint in the heart of London’s Soho district.

Just as the Velvet Underground’s debut album was viewed as a ‘sex and drugs’ LP because of a couple of songs about sadomasochistic sex (‘Venus In Furs’) and drug-taking (‘Heroin’), NSEC’s reputation as a ‘sleazy sex’ album also rested on just a few songs – most notably ‘Seedy Films’ (about telephone sex as well as pornographic films), ‘Secret Life’ (about using prostitutes behind a wife’s back), and the (now infamous) ‘Sex Dwarf’ (a song glorifying sadomasochistic sex). Later songs and albums also touched on various aspects of sexuality (their third album This Last Night In Sodom raising a few eyebrows on its’ release in 1984). They wanted to “try all of the vices” (in ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’) and also sang about having sex in cars (‘It’s A Mug’s Game’ and ‘Where Was Your Heart [When You Needed It Most’).

One of my personal favourite in the Soft Cell canon is the 2002 song ‘Perversity’ which was a bonus track on their comeback single ‘Monoculture’ after reforming in 2001. It talked about studying at the “university of perversity” and provided me with the title to my series of blogs on the A-Z of little known paraphilias and fetishes. As Marc Almond and Friends, there was also a great cover version of Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Discipline’ (a song about sadomasochism) and ‘Sleaze It, Take It, Shake It’ (by Almond’s side-project, Marc and the Mambas)

Soft cell’s second hit single ‘Bedsitter’ summed up my formative years as a teenage clubber and shares some of the same lyrical DNA as The Smiths classic ‘How Soon Is Now?’ (going to nightclubs in search of love and/or sex but going home alone). I’d also argue that Soft Cell sometimes give The Smiths a run for their money when it comes to songs about misery (e.g., ‘Chips On My Shoulder’, ‘Mr. Self-Destruct’, ‘Bleak Is My Favourite Cliché’, ‘Forever The Same’, ‘Down In The Subway’ and ‘Born To Lose’).

But Soft Cell aren’t just about sex, they also like songs about love more generally although their take on love is more about the unrequited love, the disintegration of love (‘Tainted Love’, ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’, ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’, ‘All Out Of Love’, ‘Together Alone’, ‘Desperate [For Love]’, ‘L.O.V.E. Feelings’, ‘Whatever It Takes’, ‘Last Chance’, ‘What’, ‘Barriers’, ‘Disease And Desire’, ‘Her Imagination’, ‘Desperate’, and ‘Torch’). In short they focus on (as they describe in their song ‘Loving You, Hating Me’) “the other side of love” and the “devil in my bed” (‘from ‘God-Shaped Hole’). The only other band that have explored the ‘darker’ side of love lyrically in so many different songs are Depeche Mode (which I discussed in a previous blog on obsessional lyrics in pop music). Their songs aren’t afraid to feature one-night stands and casual sex (‘Numbers’, ‘Surrender To A Stranger’, ‘Heat’, ‘Where Was Your Heart [When You Needed It Most’ and ‘Fun City’). It’s also worth noting that Soft Cell were never afraid to talk about drug use in their songs including cocaine (‘Frustration’), LSD (‘Frustration’), alcohol (‘It’s A Mug’s Game’), valium (‘Tupperware Party’, ‘My Secret Life’), heroin (‘L’Esqualita’) and their “dealer in the hall” (‘Divided Soul’).

They also made cover versions that were often better than the originals. They sexed the songs up or made them mean, moody and menacing. Soft Cell were huge fans of Northern soul and is evident in their covers of songs like ‘Tainted Love’, ‘The Night’ and ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ but their other cover versions came from a wide variety of artists including Jimi Hendrix (their 11-minute ‘Hendrix Medley’ comprising ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Voodoo Chile’), Johnny Thunders (‘Born To Lose’), Suicide (‘Ghostrider’), Lou Reed (‘Caroline Says’ as Marc and the Mambas), and John Barry (‘007 Theme’ and ‘You Only Live Twice’). From the very first note, this were instantly Soft Cell even though they didn’t write the songs.

Lyrically (and musically), some of their best songs were on their final 2000 studio album Cruelty Without Beauty. For instance, ‘Caligula Syndrome’ depicts sadomasochism (“crawling down on your hands and knees like slaves”), orgies, and “every kind of deviation on demand”. The song ‘Grand Guignol’ is about the Parisian theatre that operated from 1897 until it closed in 1962. The theatre specialised in naturalistic amoral horror entertainment shows horror shows or as Soft Cell put it: “It’s Grand Guignol/It’s rock ‘n’ roll/It’s vaudeville and burlesque/All of human life is here/In the theatre of the grotesque”. A sentiment that (I would argue) also sums up the many of the blogs I have published on this website.

*With thanks to The Passage (one of my favourite bands) who used the homonym ‘Seedy’ when naming their first CD [C-D, geddit?] compilation.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addictions, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Almond, M. (1999). Tainted Life. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.

Almond, M. (2004). In Search Of The Pleasure Palace. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.

Fanni Tutti, C. (2017). Art Sex Music. Faber & Faber: London.

Lindsay, M. (2013). Sex music for gargoyles: Soft Cell’s The Art Of Falling Apart. The Quietus, December 12. Located at: http://thequietus.com/articles/14100-soft-cell-interview-marc-almond

Reed, J. (1999). Marc Almond: The Last Star. London: Creation Books.

Reynolds, S. (2006). Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk, 1978–1984. New York: Penguin.

Tebbutt, S. (1984). Soft Cell. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.

Wikipedia (2017). Marc Almond. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Almond

Wikipedia (2017). Soft Cell. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_Cell