Abstract
Shopping is a common activity that is part of everyday life. Most people experience it as a rewarding activity, but there are some individuals, who lose control over their shopping habits, and develop shopping addiction (also termed as buying-shopping disorder, compulsive buying or buying disorder) whereby the shopping experience is characterized by uncontrollable behaviors, attitudes, and thoughts that interfere with daily activities and generate financial difficulties, problems at school or at work, disruption in relationships, among other issues. Although shopping addiction has a long history of research, there are still many aspects that remain unexplored or poorly understood within the literature. There are few studies, that explored the psycho-biological processes underpinning the behavior, and existing evidence indicates that shopping addiction shares several characteristics with other behavioral addictions. Furthermore, shopping addiction appears to be associated with certain and specific indicators of psychopathology and comorbidity. Shopping addiction is not currently recognized as a diagnosable disorder which makes the development of consensual definition and assessment tools challenging. This is still the need for further epidemiological studies, especially those assessing the effectiveness of existing treatment and intervention strategies.
“Although the chapter is titled ‘Shopping Addiction’, other terminologies are now being adopted and considered more appropriate to describe this phenomenon. For instance, ‘buying-shopping disorder’ or “compulsive buying-shopping disorder” has been deemed as a more suitable term in light of the recent evidence (Kyrios et al. 2018; Muller et al. 2019; Muller et al. 2021). Notwithstanding this, due to the scope of the book, the term ‘Shopping Addiction’ will be adopted throughout the chapter for the sake of simplicity and to align with the scope of the book.”
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Maraz, A., Costa, S. (2022). Shopping Addiction. In: Pontes, H.M. (eds) Behavioral Addictions. Studies in Neuroscience, Psychology and Behavioral Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04772-5_10
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