ArticleEuropean child & adolescent psychiatry2023
Associations between adolescents watching pornography and poor mental health in three Swedish surveys.
Article in European child & adolescent psychiatry, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Young People's Intentional and Unintentional Encounters with Internet Pornography in Australia.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Prospective Association of Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety with Pornography Viewing Frequency Among Young Adults.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Effects of Pornography on Youth: A Review.Missouri medicineReview
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The aim of this study was to examine the association between watching pornography and poor mental health in three repeated cross-sectional surveys in Sweden (2004, 2009, 2014) among high school seniors (13,277 students) with an average age of 18 years. The same index questions concerning ever having watched pornography and the frequency of watching pornography during the last year were combined with three different measures of psychological health and background control variables in multiple logistic regression and forward stepwise logistic regression models. The repeated cross-sectional surveys did not find any consistent associations across years between poor mental health and ever having watched pornography or the frequency of watching pornography. Having watched deviant pornography (containing violence, children and/or animals) was associated with poor mental health among boys in two surveys but only in one survey among girls. Other characteristics, such as mother's unemployment (especially boys), parenting style (especially high controlling parents among boys) and experiences of sexual abuse (especially penetrating abuse among girls), were more consistently and strongly associated to poor mental health across the three surveys. This study stresses the importance of controlling for multiple background variables when studying the association between watching pornography and mental health, since the association might primarily be explained by underlying confounding variables.
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