Lonely hearts, busy tabs: a moderated mediation model of pornography consumption involving difficulties in emotion regulation and loneliness in a romanian sample

This study aims to examine the indirect effect of problematicpornography consumption on the relationship between difficul-ties in emotion regulation and loneliness while also consideringthe effects of frequency of pornography use. Specifically, thehypothesized moderated mediation model includes problematicpornography consumption as mediator and frequency of por-nography use as moderator of the association between difficul-ties in emotion regulation and problematic pornographyconsumption. A total of 768 individuals from Romania (aged18–49 years; M = 28.31, SD = 8.52; 57.3% women) participated inthe study. The moderated mediation model was tested usingregression-based conditional process analysis. Results indicatedthat difficulties in emotion regulation were indirectly associatedwith loneliness via problematic pornography consumption, andthat this indirect association was conditional on the frequencyof pornography use. Specifically, frequency of pornography usemoderated the path linking difficulties in emotion regulation toproblematic pornography consumption. The frequency of por-nography use may play an important contextual role in under-standing the dynamics between difficulties in emotion regulation,problematic pornography consumption, and loneliness.