1.Salience means the behavior becomes the most important activity in a person’s life and tends to dominate his or her thinking, feelings, and behavior.
2.Mood modification refers to the emotional effect the behavior has on the individual which often serves as a coping strategy and is reported as the arousing “rush” or the numbing or the tranquilizing “escape” the behavior provides.
3.Tolerance is the process whereby increasing amounts of the behavior are required to achieve the former mood modifying effects, often meaning greater periods of time are spent engaging in the behavior, and/or there is a desired escalation in the intensity, recklessness, destructiveness, and ego-dystonic nature of the behavior. 4.Withdrawal symptoms are the unpleasant feeling states and/or physical effects (e.g., the shakes, moodiness, irritability) that occur when the person is unable to engage in the behavior.
5.Conflict references discord between the person and those around him or her (i.e., interpersonal conflict), conflicts with other activities (i.e., social life, work, hobbies, and interests) or from within the individual him or herself (i.e., intrapsychic conflict and/or subjective feelings of loss of control) that are concerned with spending too much time engaging in the addictive behavior.
6.Relapse addresses the tendency for repeated reversions to earlier patterns of excessive behavior to recur and for a common return to the most extreme patterns of excessive behavior soon after periods of control.