Research by TRF

The team at The Reward Foundation is involved in research with partners in the UK and the USA. We work closely with neuroscience experts at top universities and with addiction experts in clinical settings. Here is some original research we have published. It is all in peer-reviewed journals.

Problematic Pornography Use

Mary Sharpe and Darryl Mead were invited by the editors of the Springer journal Current Addiction Reports to write Problematic Pornography Use: Legal and Health Policy Considerations. We explore new ideas for understanding how Problematic Pornography Use can contribute to sexual violence against women and children. The article offers guidance to governments on possible health policy interventions and legal actions to prevent the development of PPU and to reduce the incidence of sexual violence in society.

Pornography Industry Disinformation Campaigns

The Pornography Industry’s Disinformation Campaign on Addiction Recovery Resources

As pornography became increasingly popular online, many unsuspecting consumers reported adverse effects. These included sexual dysfunctions, such as lack of response with real partners, delayed ejaculation, erectile difficulties, and sexual compulsivity. Some pornography consumers began congregating in online self-help portals (forums and websites) to assist one another in quitting or reducing problematic pornography use. The popularity of the self-help resources and their potential to dampen the profits of a lucrative industry resulted in disinformation campaigns run by individuals connected to the pornography industry. In this article, I examine how a paper containing significant inaccuracies about the people organising the online recovery forums passed the peer-review process while failing to disclose the author’s conflicts of interest. The author of the case study has documented affiliations with a major pornography company, MindGeek* (the owner of Pornhub). Somehow, it passed peer review, lending it a false halo of credibility. Pornography industry-connected individuals then repeatedly exploited it, for example, on social media and Wikipedia, to discredit pornography self-help recovery resources. (Emphasis supplied)

• [In the meantime MindGeek has changed its name to ‘Aylo’ since the paper was originally submitted for publication.]

If you want more detail, it is available on our Blog on this paper.

Creating disinformation: Archiving fake links on the Wayback Machine through the lens of routine activity theory

This case study uses routine activity theory to contextualise the method used by an external bad actor to create fake links within the Internet Archive for the Web site Yourbrainonporn.com. It then discusses the social media campaign which occurred two years later using screenshots of these fake links accessed via the Wayback Machine to defame the site owner. An organised disinformation campaign on social media began attacking the site owner of Yourbrainonporn.com (a pornography recovery Web site) for allegedly, accidentally, posting evidence on his own site of him searching for and hosting hardcore pornography. In fact, the list of purportedly incriminating links did not point to any content, but the defamers’ intentions seemed to have always been to set up a smear campaign against a particular site and its author. Options are discussed for the Internet Archive to provide improved guardianship and to educate the public to minimise harm from this type of social media attack based on screenshots of fake URLs.

If you want more detail, it is available on our Blog on this paper.

ICBA papers

In June 2019 TRF presented at the 6th International Conference on Behavioural Addictions in Yokohama, Japan. We delivered two joint papers in the section Hypersexual behavior and other excessive behaviors. Mary Sharpe spoke on The challenges of teaching school pupils about the research on behavioural addictions. Darryl Mead offered Aligning the “Manifesto for a European Research Network into Problematic Usage of the Internet” with the Diverse Needs of the Professional and Consumer Communities Affected by Problematic Usage of Pornography. It sets out TRF’s suggestions for the research needed over the next decade. This paper has now been published in a peer-reviewed journal. An in-depth story on the paper is here.

Our 2018 paper was Pornography and Sexuality Research Papers at the 5th International Conference on Behavioral Addictions. This conference was held in Cologne, Germany in April 2018. The paper was published in Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity online on 18 March 2019. We can provide a link to the published version by sending an email to [email protected]. A draft copy of the manuscript is available from ResearchGate.

The conference report from Cologne cited our first presentation in this field. It was Communicating the science of cybersex addiction to wider audiences.

This paper built upon Pornography and Sexuality Research Papers at the 4th International Conference on Behavioral Addictions. It was published in Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity online on 13 September 2017.  It appeared in print in Volume 24, Number 3, 2017.  More details including a review and the abstract are available on the TRF Blog. If you would like a copy of this article, please write to us through Get in Touch at the bottom of this page.

Internet Flow Model and Sexual Offending

Mary Sharpe, The Reward Foundation’s Chief Executive Officer,  has co-authored a chapter with Steve Davies of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation. It is called “The Internet Flow Model and Sexual Offending”. The chapter appeared in Working with Individuals who have Committed Sexual Offences: A Guide for Practitioners.  This was published by Routledge in February 2017 and can be purchased here.  You can also read about it by clicking on the button below:

Dr Darryl Mead, the Chair of The Reward Foundation published a paper on “The Risks Young People Face as Porn Consumers”.   This was published in Addicta: The Turkish Journal of Addictions in late 2016 and the full text is available for free.

Gary Wilson

In August 2016, Gary Wilson, the honorary research officer to The Reward Foundation, co-authored a paper with 7 US Navy doctors and psychiatrists  that was published in the journal “Behavioral Sciences”: Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports” is freely available from the Behavioral Sciences website. This is the most popular paper ever published in Behavioral Sciences and you can read it by clicking on the button below:

Gary Wilson has also written a key paper setting the direction for future research in the pornography harm field.  It is “Eliminate Chronic Internet Pornography Use to Reveal Its Effects” and was published in Addicta, The Turkish Journal of Addictions, in 2016. The link provides free access to the full study.