Psychological Distress, Motor Impulsivity and Love Addiction: The Mediating Role of Emotion Dysregulation in a Gender-Invariant Model.
Level 4 - case-series / case-control
Cross-sectional observational survey with mediation modeling
PubMed 42533520 · doi:10.1177/00332941261473827
What was done
A cross-sectional study evaluated 714 participants (mean age = 26.00 years, SD = 10.16; 68.2% women) to assess direct and indirect associations of psychological distress and motor impulsivity with love addiction. The authors evaluated the mediating role of emotion regulation difficulties (specifically lack of emotional control) and conducted multigroup structural equation modeling to test for structural gender invariance.
What was found
The abstract reports no numerical correlation coefficients, path estimates, or test statistics. Qualitatively, psychological distress and motor impulsivity were directly and positively associated with love addiction. Both were also indirectly associated with love addiction, partially and exclusively via a lack of emotional control, with this indirect pathway noted as stronger for psychological distress than for motor impulsivity. Multigroup analysis confirmed that the structural model was strictly invariant across genders.
Why it matters
The findings identify emotion dysregulation—specifically the inability to maintain control during emotional distress—as a potential intermediary link connecting distress and impulsivity to compulsive relationship patterns.
Limits
The study is observational and cross-sectional, precluding causal conclusions. Data rely on self-report measures prone to reporting bias. The sample was predominantly young and female (68.2%), and the abstract omits quantitative effect sizes and confidence intervals.
Cited by
- contradicts Women are substantially more vulnerable to love addiction or pathological relationship dependency than men.