Hoarding Research Papers

The middle-aged woman stood in the doorway of her garage looking at multiple ten foot piles of stuff she had acquired over the years. Due to the piles of junk, she couldn’t park her vehicle in her garage, nor walk through it without tripping over something. Numerous times she tried to get rid of some things and even tried paying people to sort through her items, but she had such an emotional attachment to the useless goods that nothing helped make her situation any better. As a child, she never thought she would be like this when she dreamed about her future. Sadly, this woman has a hoarding problem. “Compulsive hoarding is defined as the acquisition of a large number of possessions with failure to discard them” (Iervolino, Perroud, Fallana, Guipponi, Cherkas, Collier, & Mataix-Cols, 2009, p. 1156). Hoarding is triggered by a person’s health; mood disorders, personality disorders, eating …show more content…
They all were twin, but only 4,355 of those pairs were female twins. Through this study, scientists wanted to gain knowledge about whether gender or age difference had anything to do with excessive hoarding (Iervolino, Perroud, Fallana, Guipponi, Cherkas, Collier, & Mataix-Cols, 2009, pp. 1156-1157). Overall, only 2.3% of the participants, or 117 pairs of twins, showed signs of severe hoarding symptoms. Furthermore, these results proved that “A significantly higher rate of hoarding was observed for male [twins] than for female twins” (Iervolino, Perroud, Fallana, Guipponi, Cherkas, Collier, & Mataix-Cols, 2009, p. 1158). 4.1% of male twins under the age of forty six have a prevalence of compulsive hoarding problems as compared to female twins who only have 2.1% of a hoarding problem (Iervolino, Perroud, Fallana, Guipponi, Cherkas, Collier, & Mataix-Cols, 2009, p. 1158). Because compulsive hoarding disorder is such a relevant topic, scientists use studies to continue to investigate more into the science and logic behind compulsive