Hypersexual behaviors, problematic pornography use and mental health in an Iranian online sample: A structural equation model and results of cluster and discriminant function analysis

The purpose of this study was to determine the structural relationships, cluster and discriminant function analysis of hypersexual behaviors, problematic pornography use and mental health in an Iranian online sample. The research design was descriptive-correlational and the statistical population included all people active in social networking sites in during 2019 year. Sample size, 408 people were selected via convenience sampling. Data collection by online survey questionnaire of Mental Health Inventory (Veit & Ware, 1983), Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale (Bőthe et al., 2018), and Hypersexual Behavior Inventory (Reid et al., 2011), and data were analyzed using Pearson correlation coefficient, structural equation modeling, cluster and discriminant function analysis. The suggested model consists of suitable fitness with the data (RMSEA = 0.05, GFI = 0.96, CFI = 0.98, AGFI = 0.93; χ2/df = 2.29), and all relationships except the path of psychological well-being to the problematic pornography use were significant (β = -0.07, p = 0.306). Also, the results of cluster analysis based on hypersexual behavior and problematic pornography use in two clusters (high and low psychological distress) were significant (P <0.001). Discriminant analysis results showed that hypersexual behavior and problematic pornography use had the highest power in distinguish between two groups of people with high and low psychological distress (P<0.001), and 65.9% of people were correctly detected by this function. Individuals with high psychological distress had the highest mean values in all components of hypersexual behavior and problematic pornography use (n = 61, 63.5%).