Selfitis, selfie addiction, Twitteritis: Irresistible appeal of medical terminology for problematic behaviours in the digital age

Behaviours that are performed compulsively and repetitively and are associated with certain negative consequences have been a conceptual challenge for psychopathology. They are usually labelled as behavioural addictions, although this term has been vague, misused and applied to an exceptionally wide variety of activities (Starcevic, 2016). A similar trend to medicalise problematic behaviours has appeared more recently, with an emergence of ‘selfitis’ (Balakrishnan and Griffiths, in press). This article draws attention to these troublesome tendencies and aims to shed more light on their origin and implications.exhaustive understanding of the deficits associated with binge drinking, as well as of the possible transitiontowards alcohol-dependence.Methods: 46 young adults (23 binge drinkers, 12 women; 23 control participants, 12 women) were recruitedamong university students. They performed an emotional recognition task consisting of the visual decoding ofsix basic emotions (i.e. anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness). Accuracy scores and detectionthresholds were collected for each emotion.Results: Binge drinkers showed lower performance than control participants for the decoding of all emotions andincreased detection threshold, this later reflecting less ability to capture an emotion. Binge drinking is thusassociated with a need for higher emotional intensity to perform correct detection. Moreover, these emotionaldifficulties appear specifically related to alcohol consumption.Conclusion: These findings reinforce previous experimental evidence of altered emotional processing amongbinge drinkers, and extend these results for various emotional contents. They support the hypothesis of acontinuum between binge drinking and alcohol-dependence, in which massive emotional impairments havebeen documented. Indeed, these impairments could be involved in the onset and maintenance of excessivealcohol consumption, notably through the established relationship between emotional deficits and social distress.