London, Dec 4 (IANS): Heavy porn addiction may be driving more teenagers to share more explicit text messages, pictures or videos via smartphones, email or social networking sites, new research reveals.

A team from University of Antwerp, Belgium has found a statistically significant link between pornography and sexting for both boys and girls.

For the study, authors Joris Van Ouytsel, Koen Ponnet, and Michel Walrave, determined whether viewing pornography or watching music videos was predictive of sexting among adolescents.

They analysed media consumption and sexting behaviour of more than 300 teenagers.

“The results found in this study may be useful to consider during both prevention and treatment,” said Brenda K. Wiederhold, from Interactive Media Institute in San Diego, California and Virtual Reality Medical Institute in Brussels, Belgium.

The study titled “The Associations Between Adolescents' Consumption of Pornography and Music Videos and Their Sexting Behavior” appeared in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.