Abstract
Digital hoarding has been defined as “the accumulation of digital files to the point of loss of perspective, which eventually results in stress and disorganization”. While people hoard a large amount of items, the individual living space is obviously clutter. Compared with the hoarding disorder, the harm of the digital hoarding is more concealed and the result is more unpredictable. In addition, unlike hoarding cases to obtain worthless items, individuals may exacerbate digital hoarding behavior in order to maintain their own competitiveness and protect themselves from future threats. Neave et.al. designed a questionnaire (Digital Behaviors Questionnaire: DBQ), which is available to measure digital hoarding behaviors, comprising 2 sections: the Digital Hoarding Questionnaire (DHQ) assessing two key components of physical hoarding (accumulation and difficulty discarding); and the second measuring the extent of digital hoarding in the workplace (Digital Behaviors in the Workplace Questionnaire: DBWQ). At the same time, Thorpe et al. adapted the existing Saving Cognitions Inventory to form the Digital Saving Cognitions Inventory, and Luxon et al. measured the emotional performance of digital hoarders by modifying Object Attachment Questionnaires. However, there is a lack of measurement methods for digital hoarding behavior in the background of China. Cross-cultural research shows that the core performance of digital hoarding behavior in different cultural backgrounds is different, hoarding beliefs in China may be centered on themes of “usefulness” and “wastefulness”, compared to a wide variety of beliefs in the West, it is necessary to revise the existing scale. The cognitive performance, emotional characteristics and behavioral motivation of digital hoarders can be explained from the perspectives of ego depletion, endowment effect and evolution. Digital hoarding is widely existed in the crow, it impairs the cognitive functions such as individual's categorization, decision-making, attention and memory. It could be the result of ego depletion. Individuals with high ego depletion tend to engage in shallow cognitive processing, causing digital hoarders to “accumulate” large numbers of digital files without considering the value. Digital hoarders are often unable to manage documents effectively, hesitating to classify and rank the importance of electronic documents which involving personal emotional value or deep processing, and cognitive classification shows the characteristics of "inclusiveness". Digital technology can recreate situations, allow people to relive events and gain emotional support, causing digital hoarders difficult to delete digital photos and music. It is worth noting that the research about endowment effect indicates that loss aversion is the reason why individuals are unable to give up using digital possession, while highly involved individuals are difficult to give up enjoying digital possession. It necessary to examine the motivation of individuals for hoarding different types of digital files in the future. However, most of the previous researches were qualitative interviews, lacking of empirical data to prove the reliability of the results. In the future, researchers should be committed to exploring the causes of the individual's digital hoarding behavior, determining the extent to which it affects cognitive function, deeply analyzing the relationship between hoarding disorder and digital hoarding, in order to help individual produce good adaptive behavior and enable people to have a happy and healthy life.
Key words
Digital hoarding /
hoarding disorder /
cognition /
emotion /
motivation
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The Digital Possession in the Information Era—— Digital Hoarding and the Relevant Studies[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2021, 44(4): 800-806
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