A Longitudinal Examination of the Mediating Role of Body Dissatisfaction in the Relationship Between Pornography Use Frequency and Eating Disturbances: A Cross-Lagged Mediation Model

Albeit a positive association between pornography use frequency (PUF) and body dissatisfaction has been identified, studies examining the link between PUF and disordered eating behavior (DEB) have been highly limited in scope (e.g., only focused on men) and have several limitations (e.g., lack of a longitudinal study design and small sample size). The present study aimed to address one of these gaps by examining the longitudinal associations between PUF and DEB, while considering the mediating role of body dissatisfaction over a 1-year period in a sample of young adults. We performed an autoregressive cross-lagged analysis with a multi-group approach among 3764 adults (M_age = 23.00, SD _age = 4.74, 48.24% men and 51.75% women). Our findings showed that higher levels of PUF were cross-sectionally associated with higher levels of DEB among men and women at T1. However, at T2, higher levels of PUF were associated with lower levels of DEB among men and women. Longitudinally, baseline PUF was positively associated with DEB among men and women. However, the reverse association was not observed. Furthermore, the results indicated that body dissatisfaction partially mediated the associations of PUF at baseline (T1) with DEB at the 1-year follow-up (T2) both for men (b_indirect = .047, 95% CI [.012, .078], p = .011) and women (b_indirect = .033, 95% CI [.001, .059], p = .044). Body dissatisfaction seems to play a significant mediating role in the relationship between PUF and DEB. Clinicians treating clients with DEB may consider PUF as a potential contributing factor to the development of eating disturbances via body dissatisfaction.