HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Addictive Behaviors
This article is part of the Research TopicSimilarities and Differences Between Substance-Related and Non-Substance-Related Addictive BehaviorsView all 7 articles
Addiction Spectrum Disorder: A Conceptual Framework for Comprehensive Understanding of Addictive Disorders
Provisionally accepted
- 1Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
- 2Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat Bonn, Bonn, Germany
- 3MRC Lab Clinic, Tokyo, Japan
- 4Daegu Catholic University, Gyeongsan-si, Republic of Korea
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The term addiction or addictive disorder refers to a psychiatric condition that is characterized impulsive and compulsive seeking targets or action executions despite negative consequences are expected to occur. However, it has been used to lump widely heterogeneous conditions, such as substance use disorders, behavioral addictions, and food addiction, together, which has been causing a serious problem in understanding and defining the addictive disorder. Here we deliberate a framework toward comprehensive understanding of addictive disorders that overcome the heterogeneities of substance use disorders, behavioral addictions, and a food addiction, by considering that addictive disorders could form a spectrum of disorders, consisting of three imperative components, specifically negative reinforcements in relation to compulsive seeking, cue-induced responses in relation to associative learning, and a food addiction as an intermediate phenotype between substance use disorders and behavioral addictions.
Keywords: associative learning, behavioral addiction, Eating Disorder, food addiction, Impulsecontrol and compulsive disorder, negative affect, substance use disorder
Received: 25 Nov 2025; Accepted: 04 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Goto, Krieger, Won and Lee. 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: Yukiori Goto
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