Contributions of Socioneuroscience to Research on Coerced and Free Sexual-Affective Desire

Abstract

Neuroscience has well evidenced that the environment and, more specifically, social experience, shapes and transforms the architecture and functioning of the brain and even its genes. However, in order to understand how that happens, which types of social interactions lead to different results in brain and behavior, neurosciences require the social sciences. The social sciences have already made important contributions to neuroscience, among which the behaviorist explanations of human learning are prominent and acknowledged by the most well-known neuroscientists today. Yet neurosciences require more inputs from the social sciences to make meaning of new findings about the brain that deal with some of the most profound human questions. However, when we look at the scientific and theoretical production throughout the history of social sciences, a great fragmentation can be observed, having little interdisciplinarity and little connection between what authors in the different disciplines are contributing. This can be well seen in the field of communicative interaction. Nonetheless, this fragmentation has been overcome via the theory of communicative acts, which integrates knowledge from language and interaction theories but goes one step further in incorporating other aspects of human communication and the role of context. The theory of communicative acts is very informative to neuroscience, and a central contribution in socioneuroscience that makes possible deepening of our understanding of most pressing social problems, such as free and coerced sexual-affective desire, and achieving social and political impact toward their solution. This manuscript shows that socioneuroscience is an interdisciplinary frontier in which the dialogue between all social sciences and all natural sciences opens up an opportunity to integrate different levels of analysis in several sciences to ultimately achieve social impact regarding the most urgent human problems.

Consent? At the Start, You Do Not Even Think About It. Coercive Discourse in the Awakening of Affective–Sexual Relationships in Young Women

“…The main contribution of this article is the evidence that the women participating affirmed that consent was undermined due to coercive discourse (Racionero-Plaza et al, 2022), which impacted the awakening of sexual relationships. Previous research has demonstrated that coercive discourse is widely prevalent in society; it is publicly displayed in the media (Duque et al, 2022;Rodrigues-Mello et al, 2021;Villarejo-Carballido et al, 2022;Willing, 2022), in schools, and in peer interactions (Torras-Gómez et al, 2020;Valls et al, 2008).…”

No Time to Lose Sex-Appeal

“…We can state that based on the data collected we can identify that Bond increases his ethical behavior in line with a more inclusive society, however we cannot state -based on the data collected -that he also increases his attractiveness proportionally. The role of the coercive discourse (Racionero-Plaza et al, 2022;Ruiz-Eugenio, Racionero-Plaza, et al, 2020), which fosters attraction to violence (Gómez, MCS -Masculinities and Social Change, 11(2) 117 2015;Valls et al, 2008), towards non-egalitarian masculinities (Castro & Mara, 2014;Flecha et al, 2013;Rodrigues-Mello et al, 2021), in making some people see the last Bond as less attractive would be the subject of future research. How the socialization of people in this coercive discourse mediated to a lesser or greater extent in their perception of a more or less attractive Bond due to having more ethical behaviors remains to be further studied.…”

“You Enjoy Talking about It More than Doing It”: Fake Narratives in Disdainful Relationships

“…Along this line, findings from the field of socioneuroscience explain how the repeated socialization in the CDD through interactions with media and especially with peers reinforces the internalization of this discourse, that is, of the link between violence and attractiveness (Puigvert Mallart et al, 2019;Racionero-Plaza, Puigvert, et al, 2021;Racionero-Plaza, Ugalde, Merodio, et al, 2020;Racionero-Plaza, Ugalde, Vidu, et al, 2020). The CDD is not only internalized through experience, through engaging in disdainful sexual-affective relationships -especially hookups -, but also, and more so, through the ways in which girls who have had such experience tell their friends about it (Racionero-Plaza, Duque, et al, 2021;Torras-Gómez et al, 2019).…”