Compulsive spending often debilitating.

• Position: Holiday Shopping

The holiday shopping season can bring out the worst in people. Crowded stores, empty shelves, pressing deadlines, and endless check-out lines quickly lead to irritation and stress. Yet, for the two-eight percent of the U.S. population estimated to have a problem with compulsive buying, setting out to purchase a gift can trigger a complex series of behaviors and reactions that are psychologically--and even physically--debilitating.

"It's not uncommon to see piles of items, decades old, still wrapped, that were intended as gifts but never given away," says Randy Frost, professor of psychology at Smith College, Northampton, Mass. Situations that are hard for compulsive shoppers, he indicates, include sales, discounts, two-for-one incentives, and cable television shopping programs. "Compulsive shoppers struggle particularly when confronted with items that they know to be good bargains."

Little is known about compulsive shopping except that it is more common in women than men, is correlated with anxiety and depression, and runs the gamut of income levels. Some researchers have suggested it may be related to obsessive-compulsive...