The Cyber Effect (11 page)

Depression is another psychiatric disorder commonly found alongside the compulsive disorders, both in the real world and online. In a study
of 370 Greek adolescents, the main predictor for compulsive Internet use was the amount of time spent on the Internet, with a significant comorbidity—or concurrence—with
depression and “low locus of control.”

Locus of control
is a psychology construct developed by Julian B. Rotter in 1954 that describes a person's perspective on life and whether he or she attributes successes and failures to individual strength and perseverance—or to a twist of fate. Locus of control is about one's belief in personal control.
Locus
is Latin for “place” or “location.” Your locus of control is said to be
internal
(sometimes described as “strong”) if you take responsibility for your life and outcomes and believe you are driving events. Your locus is internal if you believe hard work and preparation are the foundations for success rather than good luck. An apt analogy taken from a children's book would be
The Little Engine That Could
, the small train that gets over the tall mountain by cheerleading itself to a successful outcome. So-called pop psychology and self-help books would refer to this as
the “power of positive thinking.” Call it what you want, but I would never disparage anything that helps people overcome adversity and live happier, more rewarding lives.

Your locus of control is
external
(sometimes described as “low”) if you believe your decisions and life are controlled by environmental factors that you cannot influence, because everything is dictated by chance or luck—or somebody else is running the show. You feel powerless, in other words. An individual with a “low locus of control,” as was found in the study of the 370 Greek boys, believes he has very little if any control over his life.

What is the relationship between locus of control and interaction with technology? Imagine the adolescent who is struggling with an Internet compulsion and feels powerless to effect a change. Imagine how easily this behavior, which is known to escalate, could become unmanageable and destructive. Whether you call it “Internet addictive behavior” or “Internet gaming disorder,” the many studies done by various disciplines from psychology to neuroscience show that adolescents who compulsively use the Internet are at increased risk of quite a few
negative social, behavioral, and health consequences—including poor academic performance, disorganized daily life, and difficult personal
relationships. In other studies, adolescents with Internet addictive behaviors were more likely to demonstrate aggressive behavior, significant among adolescents in their middle school years. Online chatting, adult pornography site viewing, online gaming, and online gambling were all associated with aggressive behavior.

The effect of attitude on outcome has been proven time and again. It's like that great line attributed to Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can, or think you can't, you're right.” Powerlessness escalates and feeds on itself. If you feel out of control, the Internet may seem like a better environment—and a way of altering locus of control. Highly responsive, the Internet and the devices we use to access it can give users a feeling of power. Dr. Martin Seligman, a cognitive behavior psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of
Learned Helplessness
and
Flourish
, describes the super-responsiveness of technology and gadgets as offering the user a false sense of control. “These technological gadgets are more responsive than anything we have ever seen on this planet,” Seligman writes. “The problem is that the outcomes over which they give us such exquisite control may be trivial….”

Seligman's work in the past decade has been to devise new approaches to retraining attitudes in the field of positive psychology. He believes that the epidemic of depression among the young is actually a “disorder of personal control.”

“How else can people judge their competence,” Seligman writes, “except by ascertaining the control they have?”

Freud would call this
repetition compulsion
. People engage in behaviors that give them a feeling of control, but paradoxically they cannot control those behaviors. This is classic addiction.

In short, technology has the upper hand against a young adolescent—providing the illusion of control while undermining it.

Since the Internet's very first image ever transmitted—an image of a sexy pinup girl—cyberspace has been a fertile ground for sexual and sexualizing content. And just think where the human urge to see sexually available women and men, or naked people engaging in sex acts, has gone in the past two decades. The predominance of porn sites online is unarguable—they now receive more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined—and represents 30 percent of the total Internet industry.
In 2015, the cellphone pornography business was estimated to have reached $2.8 billion.

Compulsive cybersex is a significant component in Internet addictive behavior for many men and women, according to
The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse
. Therapists report a growing number of patients addicted to sex online, with the standard problems associated with addictive behavior. In some cases the behavior was initiated by early exposure to pornography and conditioned by reinforcement. Other compulsive users have underlying trauma, depression, or addiction. But both men and women with cybersex compulsions show behavior that is described as “maladaptive.”

The subject of sex addiction has become as mainstream as it gets, represented by a growing number of celebrity poster boys like mouthy British comedian Russell Brand (who has also admitted to being addicted to heroin, cocaine, and booze) and
Californication
star David Duchovny, a brainy Princeton grad, no less. Not that long ago, there was no doubt of its being a diagnosable disorder. In 1987, DSM-3-R referred to sexual addiction as a sexual disorder “Not Otherwise Specified” (NOS). The term
NOS
is used to describe disorders of sexual functioning that are not classifiable in any of the specific DSM categories, and historically it was the description most commonly used for patients identified as “sexual addicts.” (One of the examples given for this disorder is “Distress about a pattern of repeated sexual relationships involving a succession of lovers who are experienced by the individual only as things to be used.”)

Just as the topic of sex addiction was becoming more recognized and discussed, it became controversial within the APA. Why? How? In
preparation for the fifth edition of DSM, Dr. Martin Kafka, a Harvard Medical School professor and psychiatrist, reviewed the entire body of scientific research and literature on the subject of
hypersexual disorder
, concluded that it very definitely existed, and prepared a proposed diagnosis for inclusion as an official disorder.

His findings in 2009:

And yet
the APA chose to disregard Kafka's presentation of the facts and decided to exclude sex addiction from DSM-5. This decision is still shrouded in mystery. I can't help but wonder what arguments experts made to one another to justify this omission. Perhaps the academy feels there is not enough scientific evidence proving that sex can become an addiction? Dr. Kafka clearly states that “the number of cases of Hypersexual Disorder reported in the peer reviewed journals greatly exceeds the number of cases of some of the codified paraphilic disorders such as Fetishism and Frotteurism.”

Given the effect technology has on sexual behavior, this omission feels both very odd and very much behind the times. Studies show that sexually compulsive individuals are more attracted to the Internet because their behavior, which often requires secrecy, is easier to satisfy there due to what Al Cooper, of the San Jose Marital and Sexuality
Center, referred to as “
the Triple A Engine.” The A's stand for
anonymity, accessibility
, and
affordability
.

Anonymous, your secret is safe. With easy access, you can find an almost limitless supply of partners while you are at home, at work, at school, in a cyber café, or on your mobile phone. The affordability of just a few dollars per month means that almost anyone can access sexually based websites from a computer somewhere.

Excessive use of online pornography is regarded by some psychologists as a manifestation of both Internet addictive behavior and sex addiction. And of the reported sex addictions, pornography addiction is the most commonly reported, particularly among younger people. The definition of a “Phase One sex addict” is an individual who is addicted to sex that doesn't involve others. This could describe untold numbers of adolescents today. The behavior is reinforced and ingrained in the same way other compulsive behaviors are—and develops very much like a drug addiction. After an initially rewarding experience with pornography, the urges become more frequent and more powerful. These connections can become so strong that simply sitting down at a computer elicits a sexual response.

Take the story of University of Pennsylvania psychologist Dr. Mary Anne Layden, whose patient, a young male who was so addicted to Internet pornography that he missed an appointment for a job interview. He literally couldn't stop his behavior. Layden tells this story in a podcast about the growing problem of men—young and mature, students as well as fathers and husbands—who have lost all interest in their lives beyond their compulsive behavior. Brain imagery of online porn addicts shows a similar pattern as it does with other addictions. The craving is real—and destroys lives.

This reminds me of a study done in 1954 by researchers Peter Milner and James Olds in which the pleasure centers of rats' brains were stimulated by electrodes that led the rats to forgo all efforts to live regular lives. The rats had to press a lever to be stimulated, then exhausted themselves pressing it over and over again. They stopped sleeping. They stopped eating or drinking water. They literally pleasured themselves to death.

Again, gender plays a role. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo, of the legendary
Stanford prison experiment, argues that young men are becoming hooked on arousal via online pornography and the results are catastrophic for both schoolwork and relationships with others. In Zimbardo's notable TED Talk in 2011 (“Why Are Boys Struggling?”) and his recent book,
Man (Dis)Connected: How Technology Has Sabotaged What It Means to Be Male
, he describes the damage to boys from excessive Internet use, excessive gaming, and pornography consumption. Zimbardo categorizes these as
arousal addictions
, and says, with “drug addiction, you want more. Arousal addiction you want different—you need novelty.”

I cannot help but feel that this resonates strongly with seeking—specifically in an online context. The average boy watches fifty pornography videos a week, according to Zimbardo's estimates, which partly explains why pornography is the fastest-growing industry in America, increasing $15 billion annually. By the time an average male is twenty-one years old, he has played ten thousand hours of video games (two-thirds of that in isolation).
Both gaming and porn, Zimbardo argues, have effectively caused a digital rewiring of boys' brains to need novelty, excitement, and constant arousal, which means they can be totally out of sync in traditional classrooms and romantic relationships.

It's time to have a discussion about online pornography addictive behavior, or arousal addiction. When people talk about it, they discuss men, teenagers, and boys all in the same spectrum. But in reality, you are talking about very different things. A grown man who develops an interest in online pornography is one thing. But for a young boy who does the same, during critical developmental phases, the problem behavior can manifest in a different way and therefore become more complex and much harder to treat.

Around the corner—and perhaps by the time this book is published—is mass distribution of Oculus Rift, a virtual-reality headset for 3-D gaming. With a helmet that will literally encase your head, eliminating the possibility that you can see the real world, or even a hint of real sunlight,
the user will be psychologically and physically immersed in the cyber environment, which will only amplify and escalate the levels of engagement, investment, and addiction. The technology was purchased and is under development by Facebook, which will undoubtedly do a bang-up job of marketing it too. If you think the adolescent gamers are having trouble giving up their remotes now, just wait until you try to get them to take off their helmets.

I feel certain that this amazing technology could be used for better purposes. Along those lines, I have recently published an extensive protocol to use virtual-reality head-mounted display units (VR HMDUs) for the
treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), involving a full range of sensory stimulation. On a positive note, my research in this area also makes me wonder if this technology isn't a potentially powerful way to relax and engage a child with behavioral difficulties. I am imagining a calming immersive VR experience of swimming with dolphins or floating down a river on a raft.