Implications
PPCS, PPU, withdrawal syndrome
In sum, the findings of the present study have two main implications for understanding the potential manifestation of withdrawal-related symptoms during pornography abstinence. First, confirmatory analyses showed that there was no evidence of negative abstinence effects (i.e., withdrawal-related symptoms) among a sample of pornography users who were using pornography at least three times a week, and this was not dependent on level of PPU (but with the caveat that the sample had relatively low levels of PPU). These null findings are important to emphasize as they provide preliminary evidence that the average regular pornography user who uses pornography somewhat regularly (i.e., a few times a week) generally does not experience withdrawal-like symptoms while trying to abstain from pornography for a 7-day period.Second, exploratory findings raise the possibility that negative abstinence effects might manifest only when both baseline FPU and PPU are high—a hypothesis that needs to be tested in future prospective studies. Exploratory analyses found that craving was an abstinence effect when PPU was high, but only once past 4-week FPU was at least daily or more. This tentatively suggests that craving could potentially be a PPU withdrawal symptom if a pornography withdrawal syndrome exists, but future adequately powered studies need to verify this finding a priori and rule out alternative theoretical explanations (e.g., craving being solely a manifestation of sexual arousal). While craving was the only significant abstinence effect under these conditions, it cannot be ruled out that adequately powered studies might find other abstinence effects.Overall, it is crucial that the findings of the present study be considered in terms of its specific sample characteristics (i.e., non-clinical, majority female sample of undergraduates from a sexually conservative country, most of whom were using pornography 3–4 times a week [61.4%], had PPCS scores below the clinical cutoff of 76 [84.7%] and had no intrinsic desire to quit their pornography use [89.8%]). These findings may not generalize to clinical samples, non-clinical samples with higher FPU or PPU, predominantly male samples, samples from more sexually liberal countries or samples composed solely of pornography users intrinsically motivated to quit their pornography use. Future studies using similar prospective designs and diverse samples with varying gender ratios and levels of FPU, PPU and intrinsic motivation to abstain from pornography use are needed to replicate and extend these findings.It is also important to consider when interpreting the present study’s findings that the study period (February–March 2021) was during the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia, when movement control and social distancing measures were enforced throughout the country (Rampal & Liew, 