PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Behav. Neurosci.
Sec. Motivation and Reward
This article is part of the Research TopicRethinking addiction: Technological advances, mechanistic insights, and the re-evaluation of substance use disordersView all articles
Craving as a transdiagnostic marker of addiction? A perspective for behavioral addictions
Provisionally accepted
- 1Université de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France
- 2CNRS, SANPSY, UMR 6033, Bordeaux, France
- 3Pôle Inter-établissement d’Addictologie, CH Ch. Perrens and CHU de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France
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The addiction term is sometimes overused, both in the media and popular discourse, to describe excessive engagement in everyday behaviors such as sugar consumption, screen use, or physical exercise. This overuse may reflect the fact that rewarding behaviors, much like use of rewarding substances, can lead to repeated use, occasionally beyond what is considered reasonable and with significant negative consequences. This raises fundamental questions: by which criteria can an addiction be identified? Is the phenomenon the same for substances and behaviors? This perspective article proposes to explore these questions by examining the relevance of craving, defined as an intense, persistent, but involuntary desire to use a specific substance/behavior. Although craving is well-established as a core criterion for substance addictions, with strong prognostic value, clinical utility, it has not yet been formally integrated into diagnostic classifications for behavioral addictions. This perspective article reviews recent evidence supporting that craving may represent a transdiagnostic construct across substance and behavioral addictions.
Keywords: behavioral addictions, craving, diagnosis, DSM, Mental Health, Transdiagnostic
Received: 18 Dec 2025; Accepted: 12 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Allache, Auriacombe, Alexandre and SERRE. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Fuschia SERRE
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