CLEVELAND – Religious fervor may play a bigger role than physical or psychological symptoms in convincing a person he or she is addicted to pornography, according to a new study by psychologists at Case Western Reserve University.

Published Wednesday in the scholarly journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, “Transgression as Addiction: Religiosity and Moral Disapproval as Predictors of Perceived Addiction to Pornography” indicates people who consider themselves very religious are inclined to believe themselves “addicted” if they view internet porn even once.

The information may help therapists understand that the perception of addiction is more about religious beliefs than actual viewing habits, researchers concluded.

“This is one of the first studies to examine the link between perceptions of addiction to online pornography and religious beliefs,” said Joshua Grubbs, a doctoral student in psychology and lead author of the study. “We were surprised the amount of viewing did not impact the perception of addiction, but strong moral beliefs did.”

For purposes of the study, Grubbs defined internet pornography as sexually explicit pictures and videos.

The study is part of an ongoing $1.4 million project funded by the John Templeton Foundation to investigate spiritual struggles and stress. Psychologists Julie Exline of CWRU and Kenneth Pargament of Bowling Green State University contributed to the research, as did Joshua Hook of the University of North Texas and Robert Carlisle from Mesa, Ariz., Public Schools.

Grubbs, who attended the evangelical Christian-focused Liberty University as an undergraduate, said he became interested in the topic after observing fellow students in distress because they thought something was terribly wrong with them after they watch online porn. He also was intrigued when he discovered half of the more than 1,200 books about pornography addiction listed on Amazon.com reside in the religious and spirituality sections. Many of the books are personal testimonials about struggles with the so-called addiction, he said, not scholarly works.

To find out why people have self-perceptions of addiction, Grubbs conducted three studies in which he surveyed people about the strength of their faith, their religious practices and their online viewing habits. Respondents also completed a survey to measure their perception of addiction.

Two of the studies involved a general student population of men and women with an average age of 19. The first study surveyed 331 participants from secular institutions of higher education; the second study surveyed 97 participants who attend religious institutions. A third study captured the views of 208 online adults 18 and older with an average age of 32.

Across the three studies, Grubbs said, more than half of the participants reported being Christian or Catholic, heterosexual and Caucasian. About a third reported no religious affiliation.

Men generally reported greater moral disapproval of viewing online pornography than did women. Overall, the three studies showed no significant gender differences in professed level of religious involvement.

All respondents acknowledged viewing online pornography at least once in the past six months, Grubbs noted, but the findings revealed no connection between the number of hours viewed and how religious a person was.

The number of hours spent viewing were similar for each study: About 25 percent of subjects reported viewing pornography one to three times in six months; 13 percent, four to six times; about 8 percent, seven to nine times, and the remaining participants 10 or more times.

Although researchers expected to find the religious subjects less likely to view online pornography, Grubbs said they were surprised to discover no significant difference in the porn-watching habits of admittedly religious and non-religious participants. Instead, religiosity and moral disapproval of pornography use were found to be robust predictors of perceived addiction to porn.