Male undergraduates were asked to self-stimulate short of ejaculation to achieve the aroused state (Ariely and Loewenstein, 2006). When aroused, a wider range of sexual stimuli became more acceptable to them, as compared to when in the cold state.5 For example, whereas only 7% were attracted to a 60-year-old-woman when unaroused, 23% were attracted after prior arousal. When unaroused, only 19% would agree to a threesome with another man if the woman requested it, whereas, following arousal, 34% would agree. Worryingly, the number who would consider using a date rape drug increased from 5% to 26% in the aroused state. Arousal increases risk-taking in that intended condom use tends to go down. It was not that participants’ knowledge went down as a result of arousal; for example, in response to a question on birth control the answer was equally highly accurate under both conditions. Rather, the change was a motivational one concerning desires, values and intentions.
There are some important implications of the ‘heat of the moment’ effect. For example, a young person who trusts the message ‘just say no’, might when aroused find resistance dissolving and being without any protection.
A person might be able to remember being in a hot state in the past, where and when it was, the circumstances that triggered it, and be able to describe its intensity. However, they often cannot simulate its emotional colouring and motivational strength to the degree needed to trigger the necessary pre-emptive action to resist later temptation. For example, a person might harmlessly agree to a date with a former lover on platonic terms, only to find irresistible passion arises on meeting. A person in a cold state might judge another’s behaviour as immoral even though that same individual making the judgement might act in just the same way in a hot state (Ariely and Loewenstein, 2006).
Safe sex messages and the practice of unsafe sex tell a similar story. A sample of North American college students performed well in terms of knowledge of HIV/AIDS and yet in the ‘heat of the moment’ tended to make assessments of risk by using superficial and irrelevant criteria such as how the potential partner appeared (Abbey et al., 2006).
If a person has a low restraint bias or simply knows of the hot-to-cold empathy gap, they might adopt the solution of taking pre-emptive action when in the cold state in anticipation of the hot state. The classical tale of Odysseus is a perfect illustration of such pre-emptive action. Odysseus did not suffer from a restraint bias, so well in advance, he correctly estimated the lure of the song of the sirens pulling him and his boat to the rocks. Therefore, before getting to the tempting location, he had his sailors tie him to the mast of the ship, so he could not alter its course and be drawn to the sirens. His sailors had their ears bunged up with wax so that they would not hear the sound of the sirens.
A puzzle concerning drug addiction might be partly explained by the restraint bias and might apply to sexual desire: why do people commonly relapse long after withdrawal symptoms have faded (Nordgren et al., 2009)? Suppose that craving has abated and with it the capacity to exploit the visceral feeling of craving to guide action. Could it be that, in this ‘recovered state’, people underestimate the craving that would be triggered by being in a drug-related environment and hence risk putting themselves back in such an environment? This might be particularly so for people with an inflated sense of their own self-efficacy. There could be a lesson here for sexual temptation and addiction.
Similarly, it appears difficult to form an emotionally coloured anticipation of the long-term aversive consequences of sexual behaviour sufficient to kill present desire. After his loss of innocence in a brothel at the age of about 14, Tolstoy wept with guilt. A highly promiscuous life was to follow, peppered with many such instances of morbid guilt and revulsion, which, by obvious implication, did little or nothing to dampen his passions. The pain of infection with venereal disease, which was rife at that time, and the horror of its treatment proved no more effective a deterrent than guilt. As A. N. Wilson (1998) notes (p. 45):
It is surely a reassuring tribute to the power of nature that the famous lechers of history like Boswell and Tolstoy lost none of their appetite for the chase in spite of the fact that one bit of bad luck could land them once more in the clinic with its primitive syringes and scarcely competent medics.
Self-control and reserve
The terms ‘self-control’ and ‘self-regulation’ refer to the capacity to exert inhibition, which, if sufficiently strong, prevents desire giving rise to sexual behaviour (Gailliot and Baumeister, 2007). The expression ‘willpower’ conveys a similar meaning. Gailliot and Baumeister (2007, p. 184) suggest that:
self-regulation would be useful primarily when there is conflict between what the individual wants to do sexually and what the individual should or ought to do. Self-control should allow people to behave as they believe they should, even if that is not what they want to do.
The evidence suggests that people who are good at self-control in one area of their lives (e.g. sexual) tend to be good in others (non-sexual), pointing to an all-purpose facility. A capacity for self-control is associated with such things as the practice of safe sex. Conversely, those who have difficulty with self-control in one area (e.g. drug-taking) also have difficulty in others (e.g. sexual).
For a given individual, the capacity for self-control varies over time, somewhat like a muscle of the body, being vulnerable to fatigue with use. Having exerted self-control in one task, the capacity to exert it in an immediately subsequent task is lowered. So, if a person needs to resist putting sexual desires into effect, the theory suggests that it would be good if they are not required to resist, say, fattening foods immediately prior to this. Conversely, the person who feels that their level of self-control in one area is unreasonably high might try depleting it by a prior exercise of resisting temptation!
Gailliot and Baumeister investigated the effect of fatiguing self-control on the tendency to infidelity. You might well have anticipated the problem in bringing this under scientific scrutiny, expressed with some understatement by the researchers (2007, p. 177):
Ethical and pragmatic obstacles prevented us from measuring actual infidelity in the laboratory.
However, it seems that, if not infidelity, at least the desire for it can be brought under scrutiny. Participants were first depleted by being given a linguistic task that required them to override habitual reactions, then placed in an imaginary situation of temptation and asked what they would most likely do. Compared to ‘non-depleted’ male participants, males ‘depleted’ by the prior test indicated an increased likelihood of infidelity. The effect was contributed by those males who were assessed as being high in desire for sex outside the established bond and low in self-control. Overall, female participants did not show an effect of depletion.
By definition, depletion is only likely to be a problem where there is a conflict characterized as trying to resist temptation. Someone trying to resist infidelity exemplifies this, as do people with a sexual addiction and those who have proclivities towards illegal sexual activities but try to resist (Gailliot and Baumeister, 2007).
The role of stress
There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.
(Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives)6
More specifically, the things were acts of adultery. Ridicule and scepticism were poured on this statement, but it might contain a kernel of truth. Evidence suggests that stress tends to favour the short-term hedonic system since the long-term restraint system becomes depleted (Hofmann et al., 2009).
A license to sin
De Witt Huberts et al. (2012) noted an additional factor that can tip the scales in favour of indulging in hedonic activities. Performing an act of virtue (e.g. giving to charity) prior to being in a situation of temptation is felt to give a license to engage in hedonic activity. The researchers looked at the temptations of snacking, but it might be extrap
olated to sexual temptation.
Construal interventions
A possible means to reduce the chances of giving in to temptation is to construe the incentive differently, to perform a ‘cognitive transformation’. Its appearance might then come to trigger automatic associations that are negative rather than positive. Fujita and Han (2009) investigated construal of food items with some suggestion of possible therapeutic interventions. For example, a candy bar might be construed as a ‘sinful diet-buster’ rather than as a ‘tasty holiday treat’. With the help of exercises in the imagination, a paedophile might try to construe a child as ‘jail-bait’ rather than as ‘desirable’.
The brain and temptation
Some people with damage to the brain show a tendency to go for risky immediate rewards in the face of longer-term negative consequences. Damage particularly to the prefrontal area is sometimes associated with hypersexuality, pointing to its role in inhibition of sexual behaviour (Mendez and Shapira, 2011). Alzheimer’s disease is one possible cause.
Krafft-Ebing (1978, p. 38) noted cases of paedophilia triggered after the onset of dementia and recorded:
The libido of those passing into senile dementia is at first expressed in lascivious speech and gesture
and
the intellect may still be sufficiently intact to allow avoidance of publicity and discovery, while the moral sense is too far gone to allow consideration of the moral significance of the act, and resistance to the impulse.
Krafft-Ebing suggested that epilepsy could trigger hypersexuality.
Ideally, people without brain damage would be investigated as bits of their brains are temporarily and harmlessly inactivated. Again, there are problems with trying to identify the brain regions underlying sexual temptation; researchers can hardly present realistic sexual temptations. However, they can study situations which appear to have features in common with sexual temptation.
One technique is that of earning monetary rewards, where there is competition between the temptation of going for an immediate but uncertain large reward (i.e. delivered with only a probability) or a delayed but safe and certain smaller reward (delivered with a 100 per cent probability). Knoch and Fehr (2007) deactivated parts of the brain temporarily by applying a localized magnetic field. When a region of the prefrontal cortex of the right brain (the dorsolateral region) was inactivated, the choice was shifted towards the seductive but risky option. They concluded that this region normally holds in check the tendency to risky behaviour leading to short-term reward.
A hidden consequence of inhibition
Folk wisdom might suggest that even with a gouged right eye or a conscious strategy of avoidance, lust could still arise spontaneously, and modern psychology has given an interesting new slant to this.
Tempting thoughts
The exertion of inhibition is not straightforward, as illustrated by an anecdote concerning Count Tolstoy and white bears (Wegner, 1994). Tolstoy tells of a person who was asked not to think about a white bear for a period of time. The individual was unable to do this, his consciousness being repeatedly subject to intrusion from thoughts of white bears. Thought suppression does not work; try Tolstoy’s experiment for yourself. In order to make a conscious effort not to think of white bears, one must hold some kind of memory of white bears in an active state and active memories have, by definition, a close link to conscious awareness.
You might guess that lustful thoughts are no easier to suppress than those of white bears and you would be right. Attempts to suppress powerful thoughts such as those of a sexual nature have the effect of making such thoughts pop into consciousness (Wegner et al., 1990).
Tempting actions
The idea that inhibition can be costly has a long tradition. Sigmund Freud (Polivy, 1998) argued that a build-up of tension is the result. He suggested that the conflict remains unconscious, whereas more recent investigators note that it engages the conscious mind, as when a person tries conscious strategies to resist temptation. Polivy (1998) reviews work which concluded that (p. 184):
restlessness, distress, or increased activity appear to result from blocked action tendencies or inhibition of motivated acts.
According to the evidence (Polivy, 1998, p. 183):
inhibiting behavior, across a wide spectrum of types of activities, often results in negative affect (discomfort or distress), cognitive disruption (including distractibility and intrusive, obsessive thoughts about the proscribed activity) and maladaptive behavior or excessive display of the suppressed activity (i.e. binges).
Something like drive (‘energizing effect’) appears within the body, not from any intrinsic source, but from a consequence of thwarting. According to this interpretation, an emotion captured by a term such as ‘relief’ or ‘catharsis’ is experienced when this tension is lowered by engaging in the activity.
Polivy assembles evidence from people who have tried to resist their activities, gambling or even television watching, with the consequence of anxiety or depression. Of course, this presents something of a dilemma. We could hardly encourage the start or continuation of any behaviour on the grounds that trying to refrain or quit might come at a psychological cost. However, it is well to be aware of this factor. It could undermine good intentions in, say, a pledge of chastity or fidelity.
Evidence suggests that when a person must limit the attention she or he gives to a ‘forbidden fruit’, this makes the fruit all the more salient and desirable (DeWall et al. 2011). The external restraining circumstances might arise from something as obvious as a scowl from a jealous partner.
In one experiment, participants needed to attend to a target image but, to do this, they had to divert their gaze from the image of an attractive person (someone other than the partner). Following this, participants valued their relationship and fidelity towards their partner less favourably. The attractive faces from which attention was diverted stood out particularly well in a subsequent test of memory and the diversion task caused participants’ attention to be more strongly captured by attractive faces.
Much seems to depend upon the process underlying the diversion of attention. Doing this voluntarily is associated with greater relationship satisfaction (Miller, 1997), whereas, if the switch is forced by external circumstances, the effect on the existing relationship is a negative one. At least, this is so for psychology undergraduates! The sort of restraint imposed by a jealous partner might well be open to conscious insight, whereas the goal of the experimenters in the task set by De Wall et al. (attention limitation) was not known by the participants. Nonetheless, the task still affected relationship satisfaction. Unrestrained ogling of others might not be recommended as a guarantee of marital harmony, but neither, apparently, could the explicit prohibition of looking. Somewhere a happy mean might exist.
Inhibition and sexual disorders
General principles of conflict
Someone might articulate in words that a particular sexual relationship or activity is morally acceptable. However, at an intuitive level based upon, say, early experience, this person might still feel moral reservation such that the behaviour is inhibited. According to Haidt (2001), the intuitive level is the default option of the system and it provides effortlessly a day-to-day moral compass. The emotions generated at this level might only be questioned when there is competition between levels, for example when the intuitive judgement conflicts with conscious wishes.
Sexual aversion disorder
The term ‘sexual aversion disorder’ refers to an actual aversion to genital contact with a sexual partner (Everaerd et al., 2000b). People with this disorder experience disgust or anxiety at the prospect of such contact.
Hypoactive desire
A study of women reporting hypoactive sexual desire (Bianchi-Demicheli et al., 2011) measured their brain activity while they view erotic images. Regions of the brain associated with sexual excitation were less strongly activated, as compared to controls who reported normal desire. In addition, a region of brai
n known from other evidence to exert inhibition on behaviour was more active in such women, when compared to controls.7
Vaginismus
The disorder termed ‘vaginismus’ refers to the situation where a woman experiences a chronic difficulty with penetration of the vagina, despite her conscious wish to achieve this (de Jong et al., 2009). It arises from an involuntary contraction of the pelvic muscles that control the tightness of the vagina. Not surprisingly, it is associated with problems of desire (Borg et al., 2010a).
When exposed to erotic stimuli, such women tend to reveal elevated levels of disgust in the pattern of their facial muscles. There appear to be two routes to triggering disgust: (a) a rapid, possibly unconsciously mediated, automatic association with the sexual stimulus; and (b) a slower conscious reflective and subjective assessment. The second process seems to be more strongly implicated in the elevated disgust reaction to sexual stimuli shown by women with this condition (Huijding et al., 2011).
Borg et al. (2010b) investigated whether those with conservative values would more readily interpret aspects of sexual behaviour, if not all sexual behaviour, in terms of moral transgression. From an early age, such values might have been assimilated into a set of core beliefs. In the samples studied, women with more conservative core beliefs tended to see sex as sinful and would at most accept only a limited range of sexual activities. So, could such a moral outlook and associated disgust be contributors to vaginismus? Women with vaginismus were found to have low scores on liberal values and high scores on conservative values, while only a relatively narrow range of sexual activities was judged to be acceptable.
How Sexual Desire Works- The Enigmatic Urge Page 26
